Praise for
A MIND SPREAD OUT ON THE GROUND
“A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is a new lens on Indigenous Canadian
literature.” —Terese Marie Mailhot, author of Heart Berries
“The future of CanLit is female, is Indigenous—is Alicia Elliott. I
anticipate this book to be featured on every ‘best of’ and award list in 2019,
and revered for years to come.” —Vivek Shraya, author of I’m Afraid of
Men and even this page is white
“Alicia Elliott has gifted us with an Indigenous woman’s coming of age
story, told through engagingly thoughtful, painfully poignant and enraging
essays on race, love and belonging. With poetic prose and searing honesty,
she lays bare what it is like to grow up Indigenous and exist in a country
proud of its tolerance, but one that has proven to be anything but. She opens
eyes and captures hearts, leading you by the hand to see our fractured world
through her eyes. Alicia Elliott is exactly the voice we need to hear now.”
—Tanya Talaga, author of Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard
Truths in a Northern City
“Incisive. That’s the word I keep coming back to. A Mind Spread Out on the
Ground is incredibly incisive. Alicia Elliott slices through the sometimes
complicated, often avoided issues affecting so many of us in this place now
called Canada. She is at once political, personal, smart, funny, global and,
best of all, divinely human. Necessary. That’s the other word I keep
thinking about. In every chapter, she manages to find the perfect word and
the precise argument needed—I found myself saying ‘yes, yes, that is
exactly it’ more than once. I am so grateful for her work.” —Katherena
Vermette, author of The Break
“A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is an astonishing book of insightful and
affecting essays that will stay with you long after the final page.” —Zoe
Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People
“This book is hard, vital medicine. It is a dance of survival and cultural
resurgence. Above all, it is breathtakingly contemporary Indigenous
philosophy, in which the street is also part of the land, and the very act of
thinking is conditioned by struggles for justice and well-being.” —Warren
Cariou, author of Lake of the Prairies
“These essays are of fiercest intelligence and courageous revelation. Here,
colonialism and poverty are not only social urgencies but violence felt and
fought in the raw of the everyday, in embodied life and intimate relations.
This is a stunning, vital triumph of writing.” —David Chariandy, author of
Brother
“Wildly brave and wholly original, Alicia Elliott is the voice that rouses us
from the mundane, speaks political poetry and brings us to the ceremony of
everyday survival. Her words remind us to carry both our weapons and our
medicines, to hold both our strength and our open, weeping hearts. A Mind
Spread Out on the Ground is what happens when you come in a good way
to offer prayer, and instead, end up telling the entire damn truth of it all.” —
Cherie Dimaline, author of The Marrow Thieves
“We need to clone Alicia Elliott because the world needs more of this
badass writer. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground showcases her peculiar
alchemy, lighting the darkest corners of racism, classism, sexism with her
laser-focused intellect and kind-hearted soul-searching.” —Eden Robinson,
author of Trickster Drift
“In A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Elliott invites readers into her
unceded mind and heart, taking us on a beautiful, incisive and punk rock
tour of Tuscarora brilliance. Elliott’s voice is fire with warmth, light, rage
and endless transformation.” —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of
This Accident of Being Lost
Copyright © 2019 Alicia Elliott All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication,
reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the
publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian
Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada
Limited.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Elliott, Alicia, author
A mind spread out on the ground / Alicia Elliott.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780385692380 (hardcover).—ISBN 9780385692397 (EPUB) 1. Native peoples—Canada—
Social conditions. 2. Colonization—Social aspects—Canada. 3. Racism—Canada. 4. Canada—Race
relations.
I. Title.
E78C2.E47 2019 971.004’97 C2018-905235-X
C2018-905236-8
Portions of the following chapters were previously published in different form: “A Mind Spread Out
on the Ground” (The Malahat Review), “Half-Breed: A Racial Biography in Five Parts” (The Toast),
“On Seeing and Being Seen” (Write and Room), “Weight” (The Malahat Review), “The Same Space”
(West End Phoenix), “Dark Matters” (Hazlitt), “On Forbidden Rooms and Intentional Forgetting”
(Canadian Women in the Literary Arts) and “Not Your Noble Savage” (Whatever Gets You Through:
Twelve Survivors on Life After Sexual Assault, Greystone Books, 2019).
Cover and interior art: © Aura@auralast Cover design: Lisa Jager
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v5.3.2
a
For the people who always made me feel like I mattered: Mom, Dad, Mike
A MIND SPREAD OUT ON THE GROUND
e took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose the way men in
movies do whenever they encounter a particularly vexing woman.
“I’m really confused. You need to give me something here. What’s
making you depressed?”
His reaction made me think briefly of residential schools, though at the
time I couldn’t understand why. Maybe it was the fact that he operated his
therapy sessions out of a church. That certainly didn’t help.
I wasn’t sure what to say. Can a metaphor or simile capture depression? It
was definitely heavy, but could I really compare it to a weight? Weight in
and of itself is not devastating; depression is. At times it made me short of
breath and at times it had the potential to be deadly, but was it really like
drowning? At least with drowning others could see the flailing limbs and
splashing water and know you needed help. Depression could slip in
entirely unnoticed and dress itself up as normalcy, so when it finally took
hold others would be so surprised they wouldn’t know how to pull you to
safety. They’d stand there staring—good-intentioned but helpless.
Empathetic, perhaps, but mute. Or, as in the case of this particularly
unqualified therapist, angry and accusing. Not that I necessarily blame
them. I’ve done the same thing.
When what was left of my family moved to the rez we lived in a two-
bedroom trailer—my sister and I in the smaller room, my three younger
brothers in the master bedroom. My parents had no bedroom, no bed. They
slept in the living room on the couch and recliner. As one may assume of
such circumstances, privacy was precious, if it existed at all. Doors never
stayed closed for long; at any moment someone could barrel in
unannounced. This meant there was no place for my mother to hide her
illness.
I’d mostly known her as having bipolar disorder, though she’d been
diagnosed and rediagnosed many times. Postpartum depression, manic
depression, schizophrenia. Most recently, my mother has been diagnosed as
having either schizoaffective disorder, which is a version of bipolar disorder
with elements of schizophrenia, or post-traumatic stress disorder, depending
on which doctor you talk to. None of these phrases gave her relief. In fact,
they often seemed to hurt her, turning every feeling she had into yet another
symptom of yet another disease.
What these words meant to my siblings and me was that our mother’s
health was on a timer. We didn’t know when the timer would go off, but
when it did, our happy, playful, hilarious mother would disappear behind a
curtain and another would emerge: alternatively angry and mournful, wired
and lethargic. When she was depressed she’d become almost entirely silent.
She’d lie on our brother’s bottom bunk and blink at us, her soft limp limbs
spilling onto the stained, slate-coloured carpet. I’d sit on the floor beside
her, smooth her hair—bottle red with grey moving in like a slow tide—and
ask her what was wrong. She’d stay silent but her face would transform.
Damp, swollen, violet, as if the words she couldn’t say were bubbling
beneath her skin, burning her up from the inside.
Terminology is tricky. Initially, depression was known as “melancholia,” a
word that first brought to my mind a field of blue cornflower and golden
hay. Its trochaic metre gave it an inherent poeticism, an ingrained elegance.
It was delicate, feminine. Hamlet’s doomed lover, Ophelia, definitely did
not suffer from depression. When she floated down that river, decked in
garlands, stones in her pockets, she was in the throes of melancholia.
The term first appeared in Mesopotamian texts in the second century
BCE. At the time, they considered melancholia a form of demonic
possession. They weren’t alone: ancient Babylonian, Chinese and Egyptian
civilizations all attributed mental illness to demons overpowering the
spiritually weak. Exorcism—which often entailed beatings, restraint and
starvation—was the only known “cure.” Even during the Renaissance,
when thinking about depression began to reflect the more progressive views
of the early Greek physician Hippocrates, a heavily Christian Europe had
another way to describe those with mental illness: witches. They were
“cured” by being burned at the stake. Sometimes, as part of their trial,
suspected witches underwent an ordeal by water. They were tied to a rope
and thrown from a boat. If they sank they’d be pulled back to a safety of
sorts, their innocence proven, but their illness unchecked. If they floated,
like Ophelia, they were considered a witch and summarily executed.
My quite Catholic mother believes demonic possession is a real danger. She
pretty much used the 1973 film The Exorcist as an instructional video for
my siblings and me. It was mostly effective. I played with a Ouija board
only once, reluctantly, and though I remained firmly in control of my body,
I still try to avoid the game (and pictures of Linda Blair) at all costs. I know
demonic possession is impossible, probably, but it still scares me more than
I’d like to admit.
So when my mother, now living in an adult care home in Florida, told me
she was hearing demonic voices and thought she needed an exorcism, I was
legitimately terrified. Not because I thought she was possessed—she didn’t
mention anything about floating above her bed, and her voice sounded
normal. I was scared for her. She truly believed demons were real and could
take control of the spiritually weak. If she believed she was being overtaken
by these demons, logic dictated that she was spiritually weak. As if her
depressed mind didn’t have enough to guilt her with.
She wouldn’t tell me what the voices were saying to her. She just
reiterated over and over that she was a sinner, that she had impure thoughts,
that she hadn’t been going to church enough. None of this seemed to me
like enough reason to call in an exorcist.
Evidently her priest down in Florida disagreed. He said it did, indeed,
sound like she was in the midst of a spiritual battle, that she should contact
the church about sending an exorcist right away. Though he himself was
part of the Catholic Church, he never offered any assistance with her
“spiritual battle,” never offered to bring in an exorcist to slay her inner
demon. He just gave her his half-baked opinion like a torch and watched as
she caught flame.
As far as analogies go, comparing depression to a demon is a pretty good
one. Both overtake your faculties, leaving you disconnected and
disembodied. Both change you so abruptly that even your loved ones barely
recognize you. Both whisper evil words and malformed truths. Both scare
most people shitless.
According to Diane Purkiss’s The Witch in History: Early Modern and
Twentieth-Century Representations, European colonists widely considered
Indigenous peoples to be devil worshippers. In fact, during the Salem witch
trials, the people of the Sagamore tribe were blamed—described by early
Puritan minister and mastermind of the witch trials, Cotton Mather, as
“horrid sorcerers, and hellish conjurors…[who] conversed with Demons.”
One person on trial claimed to have attended a black mass with the
Sagamore Indians. Mercy Short, another accused witch, took it one step
further: she claimed the Devil himself was an Indian, describing him as “not
of a Negro, but of a tawny, or an Indian color.”
Literal demonizing of Indigenous people was a natural extension of early
tactics used to move colonization along. In 1452 and 1455 the Catholic
Church issued papal bulls calling for non-Christian people to be invaded,
robbed and enslaved under the premise that they were “enemies of Christ.”
Forty years later, when Christopher Columbus accidentally arrived in the
Americas, European monarchs began to expand on the ideas contained in
those bulls, issuing policies and practices that have been collectively
referred to as the Doctrine of Discovery. These new policies dictated that
“devil-worshipping” Indigenous peoples worldwide should not even be
thought of as humans, and thus the land they had cared for and inhabited for
centuries was terra nullius, or vacant land, and Christian monarchs had the
“right” to claim it all. The Doctrine of Discovery was such a tantalizing,
seemingly guilt-free justification for genocide, even U.S. Secretary of State
Thomas Jefferson adopted it as official policy in 1792—and we all know
how much Americans wanted to distinguish themselves from Europe at the
time.
The Doctrine of Discovery is still cited in court cases today whenever
Canada or the U.S. want to shut up Indigenous tribes who complain. In an
attempt to stop this lazy, racist rationale, a delegation of Indigenous people
went to Rome in 2016 to ask the church to rescind these papal bulls.
Kahnawake Mohawk Kenneth Deer said that after hearing their concerns,
Pope Francis merely looked him in the eye and said, “I’ll pray for you.”
Two years later, after the delegation’s second trip to Rome to discuss these
papal bulls, they were told the matter was being sent to another committee.
Nothing else has been done, though presumably the Pope is still praying for
us.
“Can you imagine going to a funeral every day, maybe even two funerals,
for five to ten years?” the chief asks. He’s giving a decolonization
presentation, talking about the way colonization has affected our people
since contact. Smallpox, tuberculosis, even the common cold hit our
communities particularly hard. Then, on top of that, we had wars to contend
with—some against the French, some against the British, some against
either or neither or both. Back then death was all you could see, smell, hear
or taste. Death was all you could feel.
“What does that type of mourning, pain and loss do to you?” he asks. We
reflect on our own losses, our own mourning, our own pain. We say
nothing.
After a moment he answers himself. “It creates numbness.”
Numbness is often how people describe their experience of depression.
I was sixteen when I wrote my first suicide note. I was alone in my room,
for once. It was cold; the fire in our wood-burning stove must have gone
out. I was huddled beneath the unzipped sleeping bag I used as a comforter,
listening to the only modern rock station my ancient radio could pick up.
The songs washed over me. My brothers laughing, crashing and crying
washed over me. My mother half-heartedly yelling at them while she
watched a movie with my sister washed over me. My father’s absence
washed over me.
Even though the trailer was full I was alone. I was alone and I felt
nothing and it hurt so much. More than grief, more than anger. I just wanted
it to end.
Tears fell on the paper faster than I could write. It was hard to read in
parts. I didn’t care. As long as it reassured my family they shouldn’t blame
themselves, it would do the trick.
I looked at the knife I’d smuggled from the kitchen, pressed its edge to
my wrist. Nothing happened. The blade was too dull. I’d have to stab hard
and slash deep just to break the skin. I was crying so hard.
I reread my note. I looked back at the knife. Even though it could hardly
peel a potato it scared me more than the void I felt.
I lay back down, disgusted with myself and my lack of resolve. I tried to
listen to the radio. I couldn’t hear anything.
Though suicide was quite rare for Onkwehon:we pre-contact, after contact
and the subsequent effects of colonialism it has ballooned so much that, as
of 2013, suicide and self-inflicted injuries are the leading cause of death for
Native people under the age of forty-four. Suicide and depression rates for
our people are twice the national average. For Native youth between fifteen
and twenty-four, the suicide rate is five to seven times the national average.
Attempted suicides among Native people are also five to seven times the
national average, depending on gender. For LGBTQ2S+ Onkwehon:we, no
data exists.
Interestingly, the Centre for Suicide Prevention has found lower rates of
depression and suicide among communities that exhibit “cultural
continuity.” This includes self-government, land control, control over
education and cultural activities, and command of police, fire and health
services. In other words, the less Canada maintains its historical role as the
abusive father, micromanaging and undermining First Nations at every turn,
the better off the people are.
Lower instances of suicide were also found in communities where more
than 50 percent of the people spoke their Indigenous language. This
probably isn’t much of a surprise to an Indigenous person. We know our
cultures have meaning and worth, that that culture lives and breathes inside
our languages.
Canada knew that, too. Which is why they fought so hard to make us
forget them.
There are two scientific designations for depression. The droller, more
scientific term for melancholia is “endogenous depression.” In contrast to
exogenous, or reactive, depression—which stems from a major event such
as divorce, job loss or death in the family—melancholic depression has no
apparent outside cause. In other words, it comes out of the blue. This is a
rather ridiculous way of putting it when you consider that depression itself
is sometimes referred to as “the blues.” The blues coming out of the blue.
Go figure.
I’ve heard one person translate a Mohawk phrase for depression to,
roughly, “his mind fell to the ground.” I ask my sister about this. She’s been
studying Mohawk for the past three years and is practically fluent. She’s
raising her daughter to be the same. They’re the first members of our family
to speak the language since our paternal grandfather a handful of decades
ago.
“Wake’nikonhra’kwenhtará:’on,” she says. “It’s not quite ‘fell to the
ground.’ It’s more like, ‘His mind is…’ ” She pauses. She repeats the word
in Mohawk. Slows it down. Considers what English words in her arsenal
can best approximate the phrase. “ ‘His mind is…’ ” She moves her hands
around, palms down, as if doing a large, messy finger painting. “Literally
stretched or sprawled out on the ground. It’s all over.” She explains there’s
another phrase, too. Wake’nikonhrèn:ton. It means “the mind is suspended.”
Both words indicate an inability to concentrate. That’s one of the signs of
depression. I know because I’ve checked it off in the copy of Mind Over
Mood I took out from the library. It says my depression currently scores a
32 out of a possible 57, or 56 percent. Not the worst. At least I’m not
considering suicide. Suicidal thoughts is number ten on the checklist.
There is nothing in the book about the importance of culture, nothing
about intergenerational trauma, racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia,
transphobia. As if depression doesn’t “see” petty things like race or gender
or sexual orientation.
“We’re all just people, man,” melancholia mutters, pushing its white-boy
dreads aside as it passes me a joint.
I’ve heard people say that when you learn a people’s language, you learn
their culture. It tells you how they think of the world, how they experience
it. That’s why translation is so difficult—you have to take one way of
seeing the world and translate it to another, while still piecing the words
together so they make sense.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about why there is no Mohawk word to
differentiate between reactive and melancholic depression. No scientific
jargon to legitimize and pathologize. Just wake’nikonhrèn:ton and
wake’nikonhra’kwenhtará:’on. A mind hanging by a thread, and a mind
spread out on the ground. A before and an after—the same way we measure
ourselves against colonialism. What does that mean about our culture?
If we had had more terms and definitions backing up our understanding
of depression, would we have been better equipped to deal with it when its
effects began tearing our communities apart? Would those who wanted to
civilize us have been more open to listening to our pain if we’d used their
words? How much could “endogenous,” “exogenous,” “depression” or
“melancholia” have helped when they’re all essentially referring to the
same thing? How many ways do we need to describe a person in pain that
needs help to heal?
Is there a language of depression? I’m not sure. Depression often seems
to me like the exact opposite of language. It takes your tongue, your
thoughts, your self-worth, and leaves an empty vessel. Not that different
from colonialism, actually. In fact, the Mind Over Mood Depression
Inventory could double as a checklist for the effects of colonialism on our
people. Sad or depressed mood? Check. Feelings of guilt? Check.
Irritability? Considering how fast my dad’s side of the family are to yell,
check. Finding it harder than usual to do things? Well, Canada tried to
eradicate our entire way of being, then forced us to take on their values and
wondered why we couldn’t cope. Definite check. Low self-esteem, self-
critical thoughts, tiredness or loss of energy, difficulty making decisions,
seeing the future as hopeless, recurrent thoughts of death, suicidal thoughts?
Check, check, check.
And if colonialism is like depression, and the Onkwehon:we suffering
from it are witches, then I guess it shouldn’t surprise anyone that our
treatment has always been the same: to light us on fire and let us burn.
I now understand why that therapist in that church reminded me of
residential schools. When I think of that man sitting across from me,
chastising me for not saying the right words, the words that made it easy for
him to understand me and cure me, I think of how my great-grandparents
felt when priests and nuns did the same to them. The difference is that the
therapist was trying to cure me of being depressed; those priests and nuns
were trying to cure my ancestors of being Indian. In some ways they
succeeded. In many they did not.
Both depression and colonialism have stolen my language in different
ways. I know this. I feel it inside me even as I struggle to explain it. But
that does not mean I have to accept it. I struggle against colonialism the
same way I struggle against depression—by telling myself that I’m not
worthless, that I’m not a failure, that things will get better.
Our Haudenosaunee condolence ceremony was created by Hiawatha to
help a person in mourning after a death. Whoever is conducting the
condolence recites the Requickening Address as they offer the grieving
person three strands of wampum, one at a time.
One: soft, white deer cloth is used to wipe the tears from their eyes so
they can see the beauty of creation again.
Two: a soft feather is used to remove the dust from their ears so they can
hear the kind words of those around them.
Three: water, the original medicine, is used to wash away the dust settled
in their throats that keeps them from speaking, from breathing, from
reconnecting with the world outside their grief.
I know this is supposed to be a ceremony for people with reactive
depression caused by a death. As far as I know there is no condolence
ceremony for those Onkwehon:we suffering from melancholia—those who
are, in effect, mourning themselves. There’s no collective condolence
ceremony for our people, either—those who need help to see our beauty
and hear our songs and speak our language. But maybe, one day, there can
be.
Things that were stolen once can be stolen back.
HALF-BREED
A Racial Biography in Five Parts
Dental hygiene was a self-directed exercise in my childhood home,
which meant it didn’t happen. Unused toothbrushes sat stiff-bristled and
impeccable in cups beside the sink. I only ever noticed a smell on my
father’s breath, though: an alcoholic bitterness. The smell usually
corresponded with the subwoofer trembling at midnight, spitting out Bonnie
Raitt and other smooth-voiced saints of heartbreak.
I separated my father into two entities: the one who played Resident Evil
with us for hours, laughing when a zombie jumped out and scared him, then
sneaking outside to bang on the living room window to scare us in turn, and
the one who stared at me dead-eyed when I asked him to turn down his
drunken music. Mom never bothered to explain why Dad’s voice was so
loud and slurred. I had no clue my father was having problems weaving
himself into the tapestry of white suburban bliss. I never knew about the
promotions he’d seen slip past him despite being one of the top salesmen in
every company he worked for. I never knew about the rampant alcoholism
on his side of the family, its body count. All I knew was when we went
down to Six Nations for the powwow, all my aunts and uncles and cousins
were loud and laughing, too, their breath the same scent I then considered
genetic. They didn’t dote on my siblings and me the same way they doted
on my cousins, pinching their cheeks with one hand, holding a beer bottle in
the other. But at least there was musical consistency: Bonnie Raitt always
there, crooning me awake.
In grade two I went to Native American Magnet School #19 in Buffalo,
New York. Part of its mandate was to provide a class for its handful of
Native kids to learn Native culture. Every day we would slip away from the
droning arithmetic of our classrooms into a space dispassionately hung with
dreamcatchers and laminated warriors. The curriculum was a grab bag of
general knowledge. What the Navajo ate, what the Oneida wore. Neat,
bloodless trivia isolated from historical context. They’d show us teepees
and longhouses and adobes drawn over state lines, as if we could belong in
America as easily as those sketches on that map. Then we’d sneak back to
our regular classes and continue like we never left, a collective amnesia
settling over us.
There was one white girl in my Native class: Regina. She wanted to
make crafts and sing songs with her best friend, Brittany, so her parents
claimed a sliver of Cherokee ancestry and the school let her in. I hated this,
because I hated Regina. Before she came along, Brittany was my best
friend. The way Regina’s parents successfully lied her way into my Native
class filled me with a rage so intense it could only ever be understood by
fellow vengeful seven-year-olds.
The other kids knew why we were being whisked away between math
and spelling. Yet when my new best friend, a Puerto Rican girl named
Rosita, saw my father and asked if he was Native, disgust curdling her
words, I paused. She couldn’t already tell? Where did she think I went
every day?
I had never really considered it before, but I looked more like Regina
than I did my father. It was as if his genes had skipped over me entirely. I
realized then I had a choice. I’d fallen down a rabbit hole into a racial
Wonderland where logic was negotiable. Only I wasn’t Alice; I was the
Cheshire Cat, the Trickster. If I wanted I could say I was part Mexican or
Italian or Mongolian, and the person would squint, but nod. As though they
accepted that America’s melting pot would sooner or later boil all races
down to a pale person like me.
“He’s not Native. He’s Puerto Rican.”
Like Regina, I could pretend.
I waited to be called out as a fraud, for my father to stride over and tell
everyone the truth. But nothing happened. Incredibly, Rosita believed me. I
was too cool to be Native anyway, she rationalized, too clean. She cemented
our newfound racial sisterhood with a necklace of the Puerto Rican flag
cleverly assembled from red, white and blue pony beads.
I wore that necklace with an absurd, anxious pride, wondering whether
Regina felt the same uneasiness when she brought home her construction
paper headdresses and three sisters soup recipes.
My mother, like any good Catholic, raised us in the faith. We were fed
divine mercy chaplets and patron saints more often than food. Even my
steely-willed father wasn’t immune; he converted to Catholicism for her
eventually. I still remember his baptism. It was a bizarre tableau, a scene
from some forgotten fairy tale: a giant Native man hunched over a stone
fountain meant for babies as water spilled from his thick black hair. After
that he dutifully sat in the pews with us on Sundays, silent and focused until
he had to shut us up with a furrowed glare.
When we moved to Six Nations he started going to Longhouse and
getting involved in sticky rez politics. Staying out long and sleeping deep.
Finding his roots, he said. Mom said roots were nothing if they led to Hell.
All her prayers’ intentions were for his recommitment to Catholicism.
While we kids droned half-heartedly through every Hail Mary, her prayers
took on the tenor of threats. She claimed she was just worried about Dad’s
soul, but it was more than that. Every step he took towards his Native
identity was another step away from her. With us she felt the same. If we
ever went to Longhouse she’d rant for hours about how we weren’t just
Native, you know. We had other heritage and we shouldn’t hide it. Were we
ashamed of our own mother?
It was around this time I started taking Canadian History in high school.
We covered residential schools in broad strokes and clinical tones, giving
the impression these schools were from an era long past. Kids pulled
screaming out of their homes, forced to speak English and say the rosary
and endure all manner of abuse, returning to families with whom they could
no longer communicate. My teacher never mentioned that the Mohawk
Institute, Brantford’s residential school and unhappy home for over two
hundred Six Nations kids, remained fully operational until 1970. I’m not
entirely sure she knew, despite its having been turned into a museum a short
drive away.
I asked my father if he knew the residential school was open until the
’70s. “The Mush Hole? Yeah.” His voice was terse, pained, as if I was
picking at a scab that had just started to heal. I dropped the subject.
My curiosity was hardly sated, though. As soon as my dad went out, I
explained what residential schools were to my mother. She being our
family’s religious ambassador, I asked her how members of the Catholic
Church could do such awful things to children. She hesitated. Then, with a
politician’s duplicitous finesse, she said that while those priests and nuns
were extreme, they did save many Indian kids’ souls. They probably
thought they were doing God’s will. It seemed strange that she—the most
compassionate person I’d ever met—was defending such abusive methods
of indoctrination, as if Heaven were a gang you got jumped into. “It was
another time,” she said. “They had different ideas then.”
She’d start a rosary just as my father was supposed to get home from
some community meeting. A door slam would announce his entrance and
just as quickly his exit. My mother’s face was like shards of glass, broken
but dangerous.
On the hour-long bus ride from our homes in Six Nations to our high
school in Brantford, Ontario, one person was wordlessly, unanimously
agreed upon as the bus punching bag. Most years it was Ryan. His sloped
forehead, large stature and passive nature proved an irresistible cocktail to
the violent and otherwise insecure. That is, until Ryan’s mother pulled him
off the bus and Carrie came along. I was in grade eleven, she was in grade
nine: loud and raucous and well liked. You could tell she had a white
mother, too, but all it took was one good “innit” to know Carrie belonged in
ways I never could. Besides, her hurricane of a personality prohibited
certain questions about blood quantum and skin shades.
She’d been on the bus a week. As usual, I kept to myself, hood up,
headphones on, straining for invisibility. When the handfuls of pennies
smattered against my head, I was only shocked for a moment. Her laugh
was unmistakable, her sugary voice spitting “white girl” like fire. Her pale
jester face—somehow swept of all irony—ducking down every time I
turned around.
My Trickster designation was officially null and void.
That’s when it became clear: whiteness meant different things in different
contexts. On the rez, Carrie and I could share skin colours and still be
perceived entirely differently as Native people. While my culture was
derived solely from Michael Jackson videos and Disney’s dubious visions
of femininity, Carrie’s culture was slowly, carefully poured into her hands
the same way generations of Six Nations people had culture poured into
theirs. It didn’t matter that I never chose to be born in Buffalo and raised
generically American; that’s just the way it was. Eventually there was
nothing for me to do but sit there, let the pennies ricochet off my head and
hope my non-reaction would make Carrie bored instead of incensed.
The day my kid was born, the powwow was rained out. All the
spectators and dancers made for the lacrosse arena, leaving Chiefswood
Park soggy and deserted. I hated those arena powwows. I hated that my
boyfriend Mike’s first powwow was one of those powwows. The
experience wasn’t right without the dancers blurring against the grass like
rushed strokes of paint, haggling over beaded jewellery I couldn’t afford,
dribbling Indian taco grease onto my shirt and giggling as white visitors
claimed their great-great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess.
It had been eleven days since my due date and I’d been having irregular
contractions for the past two. My dad and brothers were away on a month-
long Unity Run, culling my support system down to a skeleton crew. I
wondered whether my dad’s absence had anything to do with my staunch
biological dismissal of his many “marry Native, have Native babies”
speeches. Before he left he reminded me my child wouldn’t have a status
card, that Mike wouldn’t be allowed to live on the reserve. I’d rolled my
eyes, all eighteen-year-old panache.
My water broke. When we arrived at the birthing centre, my midwife
took control, not even balking at my insistence that Coldplay’s Parachutes
soundtrack the next twelve hours. As the labour progressed, though, my
father’s family history began prowling in the back of my mind. I hadn’t
given it much thought until then. I thought of his mother, the only one in
her family who didn’t go to residential school, leaving her Six Nations
home for Buffalo so her children, too, could bypass the Mush Hole. His
father murdered by a white bartender over ten dollars. His older brother
murdered by two white men in a roadside scuffle. He himself beaten to a
bloodied mass by a white man with a baseball bat at a bar. His was a family
legacy that often changed forms. One day it appeared as a six-pack of Bud
Light, another as white fingers squeezing a trigger. Sometimes it struck with
such violence its only consolation was that it was over quickly; other times
it snuck up, draining a life one excruciating drop at a time.
Then my kid came barrelling out of me. Once their complexion settled
from the red shock of newborn skin to soft pink, my anxiety abated. Any
visible traces of their Native heritage had been blotted out. They didn’t even
have the brown eyes I’d considered my family’s defining trait; squinting
from between blond lashes were two splashes of indigo. As much as it
made me sick to admit it, internalized racism had warped me so much that I
was actually relieved that my child didn’t look like my father, my aunts, my
uncle, my grandmother. In a better world, one that didn’t treat my dark-
skinned relatives with violence and indignity and death for the way they
looked, I would have been able to long for my child to have the thick, black
hair and deep-brown skin my family members have without feeling fear. I
would have been able to be disappointed that I didn’t see visible reminders
of my family line peeking through in my child. I wanted to be able to be
disappointed. At that time, in this world, I wasn’t. I knew those eyes, that
skin, had given them a shield when they could have been a target. Now my
kid could, if they chose, deflect the sharp, parasitic legacy of shame and
violence they’d inherited and disappear into whiteness. I’d been given the
same shield, the same opportunity. I’d never had any of the experiences my
father’s family had. I probably never would.
But at the same time, while my baby’s whiteness gave them a shield, it
also erected a barricade between them and their people. They didn’t look
like kin; they looked like an enemy. If they were on the rez, would they be
seen as Tuscarora? Or would they be treated as just another white person on
a poverty tour? Holding my baby for the first time surrounded by loving,
Indigenous midwives, I remembered the pain of passing. The way you deny
parts of yourself to appease others, as though identity were so easily
partitioned. This day with these people you’re Native, while this day with
these people you’re white. Everything will be fine. You will be fine,
ducking in and out of labels with a smile pasted on. All the guilt any white
person feels for centuries of racial genocide and injustice welled up in me.
But it was more complicated than that: I was both the winner and the loser,
the victim and the abuser. Two strains married in me, impossibly. Any time
I felt outrage at something a white person said or did to my people, I felt
like a fraud, as if I, too, were culpable. Yet if a Native person made a
sweeping statement about white people, I couldn’t help but question my
belonging. After all, I didn’t have enough knowledge of my culture to
mitigate my skin colour. Defences were always up. The tear always
widening.
When my father talked about the issues our people faced, he uttered a
three-word mantra as the solution: decolonizing the mind. He was referring
to a process of retraining one’s brain to reject the values of Western culture.
Or, in his words, “to stop living in the boat, and come back to the canoe.”
That solution fell flat for me. Born from both the boat and the canoe, I’d
always felt I didn’t belong in either, so I was left drowning in between.
Maybe being mixed-race doesn’t have to mean shaming myself out of my
Indigeneity just because I wasn’t raised in the culture: silently, safely
watching from my whiteness as Native people around me suffered. Maybe
it doesn’t have to feel like forcing a smile for the same white people who
continually gut my community and myself with dull blades.
This is how I can decolonize my mind: by refusing the colonial narratives
that try to keep me alienated from my own community. I can raise my kid to
love being Haudenosaunee in a way my parents couldn’t, in a way my
grandparents couldn’t. This is my responsibility as a Haudenosaunee
woman.
But my white-passing privilege gives me another, more complex
responsibility. I have to use my white privilege like an undercover agent
would use a good disguise, leveraging my lightness to drop the guard of
non-Indigenous people around me, then slowly, methodically picking at
their inherited colonialism, forcing them to re-evaluate their own complicity
in a way they may not have if they could easily identify me as Indigenous.
More importantly, I need to lift up the voices of those in my community
who, like my uncle, like my grandfather, like my father, are treated as less
than human, unworthy of attention or time, because their skin is too dark for
certain people’s liking. I need to make sure that their experiences are
centred, that their concerns are heard, that their needs are met.
Being both Haudenosaunee and white wasn’t a curse meant to tear me in
two; it was a call to uphold the different responsibilities that came with each
part of me. Turns out my dad was wrong. I didn’t need to worry about
whether to get in the boat or the canoe, and I certainly didn’t need to drown
in between. Understanding and honouring my unique responsibilities was
always the way to keep myself afloat.
ON SEEING AND BEING SEEN
’ve heard that when you see someone you love your pupils get bigger, as
if your eyes themselves want to swallow them up and trap them inside. I
don’t know if that same physiology applies to seeing objects, but I like to
imagine my pupils were huge, hungry black orbs when I first read Michi
Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, activist and teacher Leanne Betasamosake
Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love. Every sentence felt like a fingertip
strumming a neglected chord in my life, creating the most gorgeous music
I’d ever heard.
It was the first time I, an Indigenous woman, had read the work of
another Indigenous woman. It was such an intimate and personally
revelatory moment—as if she had reached out from the pages, lifted my
face and smiled. She can see me, I thought. She can see me. I was twenty-
five years old.
I’d known I wanted to write since I was twelve, but back then I’d never
seen a girl like myself in the books I loved so much. I saw white girls—
often upper middle class, often pining after unremarkable white boys. So
that’s what I wrote. I wrote my way out of used clothes and food banks and
parents who screamed in the night. None of my characters ever worried
about money. None of them were concerned what their friends would think
if they met their Haudenosaunee dad or their white bipolar mother. None of
them even had a Haudenosaunee dad or white bipolar mother. Things were
simple; things were normal. Rich boys and brand names were normal.
My taste in literature changed as I got older. What didn’t change was my
suspicion that publishers felt Indigenous girls like me were unworthy of
book covers or book deals. Even in university the writers we studied were
white: Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Jane Austen. I admired the work of
these women, but they weren’t writing what I needed to read, and this made
it hard to believe there was space for what I needed to write.
So imagine my surprise when a fellow writer—a white woman—told me
during post-workshop beers that I was going to get published right away
because I was Native. My fiction at that time included one short story about
a white woman with a mixed-race child and the beginning of a novel about
three generations of Indigenous women. I was particularly excited about the
novel, about the possibility of writing Native women like the ones I knew,
and the workshop feedback was enthusiastic. Still, this white woman—who
wrote effusive comments on all my work—had determined that my talent
was not enough to get me published. Only my ethnicity could do that. The
funny thing was, I could count the Native writers I knew of with half a hand
—none of whom were women, and none of whom were writing about
Native women in a way I recognized.
The idea that the colonialism, racism and sexism that had systematically
kept Indigenous women out of the literary community could somehow be
leveraged to benefit me as an Indigenous woman through some half-assed
literary affirmative action was absurd. And yet this white woman believed it
with her whole heart. This white woman, who got into an MFA program
while I was rejected from every one I applied for. Perhaps I hadn’t made it
clear enough on the application that I was Native. Perhaps I had made it too
clear on the application I was Native. It was hard to say.
I stopped writing for years after those rejections. When I did write—
between being a mother and shifts at my minimum-wage job—I scraped all
Indigeneity out of my work. At least if my fiction read as “white” I’d be
sure that any rejections were based on the work itself. I wouldn’t have to
field questions about why my characters were Native, or deal with
criticisms that they somehow weren’t “Indian enough”—issues that, as far
as I could tell, never came up for white writers, for white work.
Then came Islands of Decolonial Love. Everything changed. Reading
stories of Indigenous women who had good sex and bad boyfriends, who
dealt with both underhanded and overt racism, who spoke their language
and loved their families, gave me hope. Here—in these pages—was what
I’d been searching for my whole life. Finally, after twenty-five years, I felt
there was space for me to breathe inside the claustrophobic world of
Canadian literature. Reading Simpson’s stories ultimately gave me
permission to write my own.
Of course, this didn’t change the realities of the publishing industry. I
once entered a short-story contest with a piece about a complicated
relationship between two Indigenous women and lost to a story written by a
white American man that not only appropriated but outright misrepresented
Indigenous ceremonies. His story featured stereotypical drunken,
dysfunctional Indians, one of whom offered his white girlfriend—the
story’s protagonist, naturally—to his brother during potlatch. His brother
accepted, and the two went off and had sex in the woods, the rest of the
Natives vomiting and partying around them.
Potlatch ceremonies had to be held in secret from 1885 until 1951
because they were banned by the Canadian government. There was a raid
on the B.C. village of Memkumlis in 1921, and forty-five people
performing potlatch were arrested. Twenty of those arrested were sent to
prison. I shudder to think of how their grandchildren would react if they
read this story and saw how the powerful ceremony their ancestors fought
for was turned into racist, colonial poverty porn. The old questions
emerged: Was this, a story written by a white man in another country, more
“Indian” than my own writing as an Indigenous woman? Did this racist
portrayal and cultural appropriation of Indigenous people matter if the story
was otherwise “good”?
That is the crucial problem with the push for “diversity” in publishing—
something I’ve known my whole life but have only recently been able to
articulate. “Diversity” is not about letting those who aren’t white make
whatever art matters to them and their communities. If that were the case, it
would not havetaken me twenty-five years to find a book that represented
Indigenous women in a meaningful way.
No, “diversity,” as Tania Canas so succinctly puts it in her essay
“Diversity is a White Word,” is about making sense of difference “through
the white lens…by creating, curating and demanding palatable definitions
of ‘diversity’ but only in relation to what this means in terms of whiteness.”
It’s the literary equivalent of “ethnic” restaurants: they please white people
because they provide them with “exotic” new flavours, but if they don’t
appease white people’s sensitive taste buds they’re not worth a damn.
White authors writing from other racial perspectives is hardly new. As
early as 1893, Mohawk writer Pauline Johnson criticized how white writers
portrayed Native women. Back then, countless white authors—particularly
men—wrote the “Indian maiden” trope: Native women so hopelessly in
love with white men that they were willing to betray their nation to help the
men achieve their goals. When this did not win the love of these dashing
white men, as it almost never did—for what white man in his right mind
would love a Native woman when white women were available?—the
heartbroken Indian maidens would commit suicide. In her Toronto Sunday
Globe editorial “A Strong Race Opinion,” Johnson called out these writers
for their ignorance:
Perhaps, sometimes an Indian romance may be written by someone who
will be clever enough to portray national character without ever coming
in contact with it….But such things are rare, half of our authors who
write up Indian stuff have never been on an Indian reserve in their lives,
have never met a “real live” Redman…; what wonder that their
conception of a people that they are ignorant of, save by hearsay, is
dwarfed, erroneous and delusive.
Johnson could very well have been describing the white man who, a
hundred and twenty years later, wrote that contest-winning story about
potlatch. Research into Indigenous life is not necessary because these
writers are not writing real Indigenous people; they are writing Indigenous
stereotypes that their white readers recognize and falsely consider authentic.
Perhaps these white writers believe, as my classmate did, that Black
writers, Indigenous writers and other writers of colour have an edge in the
current publishing climate, and as a result, white writers must now make
their texts more “diverse” to compete. Johnson made a similar argument
back in 1893: “Do [non-Native] authors who write Indian romances love
the nation they endeavour successfully or unsuccessfully to describe?…or is
the Indian introduced into literature but to lend a dash of vivid colouring to
an otherwise tame and sombre picture of colonial life?” These questions
remain pertinent for white writers to answer. Yet it would seem those are
exactly the questions they want to avoid.
I will not say that these authors cannot write from an experience they’ve
never had. To an extent, all fiction writers write from experiences they’ve
never had, since the characters they’re writing aren’t real. However, there is
a marked difference between the way the man who wrote the potlatch story
wrote Indigenous people and the way Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
writes Indigenous people. What is that difference? Well, there is this oft-
cited notion that you can write from any perspective as long as you write
with empathy. I don’t know whether the white man who wrote about the
potlatch felt he was writing with empathy. He may have. He might have no
idea why his words were offensive to me. He could even read this essay and
liken my criticism of his work to censorship.
That was British author Lionel Shriver’s reaction to the Washington Post
review of her novel The Mandibles, in which (white) writer Ken Kalfus said
Shriver’s Black and Latinx characters were “racist characterizations.” The
Black woman in her book has dementia and is either restrained or led
around on a leash by her white husband. The Latinx character is a pudgy,
lisping Mexican-born man who uses lax immigration laws and
constitutional amendments to become America’s “criminally incompetent”
president. Instead of asking herself questions similar to those Johnson
posed, or considering Kalfus’s criticism, Shriver wrote a speech
complaining about “fiction and identity politics” and delivered it at the
Brisbane Writers Festival. In it, she claimed people concerned about
inaccurate representations and cultural appropriation in fiction were stifling
free speech. Of course, that’s the knee-jerk reaction many white people
have when marginalized communities criticize them: criticism magically
becomes censorship. Who knows? Maybe Shriver thought she was writing
with empathy, too.
But writing with empathy is not enough. It never has been. Depictions
like these—reactions like these—are proof that white people are willing to
extend only so much empathy to those who aren’t white. Empathy has its
limits—and, contrary to what some may think, it is possible to both have
empathy for a person and still hold inherited, unacknowledged racist views
about them. How else do you explain the Canadian government’s apology
for residential schools and pleas for reconciliation coexisting with its
continued, purposeful underfunding of Indigenous children? How do you
explain the national outrage over the murder of fifteen-year-old Tina
Fontaine existing at the same time as the national silence over the child
welfare system that targeted her as an Indigenous youth and made her so
vulnerable in the first place?
To truly write from another experience in an authentic way, you need
more than empathy. You need to write with love. That is what I felt when I
read Simpson’s stories. That’s what I feel when I read the work of Gwen
Benaway, Waubgeshig Rice, Tracey Lindberg, Eden Robinson, Katherena
Vermette, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Joshua Whitehead, Lindsay Nixon, Kateri
Akiwenzie-Damm and Cherie Dimaline. That’s what I hope Indigenous
people feel when they read my work. Love.
If you can’t write about us with a love for who we are as a people, what
we’ve survived, what we’ve accomplished despite all attempts to keep us
from doing so; if you can’t look at us as we are and feel your pupils go
wide, rendering all stereotypes a sham, a poor copy, a disgrace—then why
are you writing about us at all?
WEIGHT
ou know as soon as it happens, feel it like a tiny pebble settling in your
uterus. This directly contradicts your grade ten health class, which
claimed it takes days, not seconds, for implantation, but the Catholic
paranoia you’ve inherited from your mother is far stronger than logic.
Another thing you were supposed to have learned in grade ten health
class: strategic ways to say no to men you imagined as mustachioed villains
from silent films, tying women to railroad tracks between exaggerated title
cards. You never imagined having to say no to real boys. Your femininity
was safely bundled beneath cheap, ill-fitting sweaters and baggy jeans, a
veritable Do Not Enter sign you hoped would keep out the unworthy. You
certainly didn’t expect to have to say no to the boy, the one you’d been
pining after since grade ten, inspiring you to obsessively scribble “MIKE +
ALICIA” on the wooden slats that held up your sister’s top bunk. Yet here
you were: in a lukewarm, year-long relationship frequently punctuated by
your sighs and his silence.
You wanted to say no to him that night, but despite your Ontario
curriculum training, you weren’t really sure how, so you reluctantly agreed.
It was quick, awkward and silent, surrounded by sleeping boys you barely
knew who were there for Mike’s birthday party. Even though there was no
Hallelujah choir or moment of transcendence, there was still a minor thrill
in finally doing something your Catholic mother disapproved of. That was
sort of an achievement.
Your high school is called PJ, which stands for Pauline Johnson, the local
Mohawk poet good enough to name a school after but apparently not good
enough to have her work taught within it. Students at rival high schools use
the initials quite differently, though, referring to you and your classmates as
“Pregnant Juveniles.” The nickname’s an unfortunate, if predictable, side
effect of being the only high school sensible enough to offer a daycare in
the teen-pregnancy capital of Canada. All the knocked-up teens in
Brantford get shuttled here, stretch marks peeking out of their low-rise
jeans, strollers stowed away in their lockers. You used to look down on
those girls. Now you’re sure you can feel your organs shifting inside as you
walk down the halls. You wonder if that’s how those girls felt, too, as their
lower abdomens pushed into that telltale pear shape and whispers grew to a
hum.
Mike doesn’t mention it, but you know he’s worried, too. He’ll
sometimes lean in close after friends leave and ask if you’re in the clear yet.
You press your lips together, make a light-hearted joke.
Whenever you’re alone, you place an anxious hand on your belly, feeling
for a fluttering heartbeat. You’ve heard throwing yourself down the stairs
can cause miscarriage. But stairs are in short supply when you live in a
trailer on the rez. You wonder whether jumping from your half-metre-high
porch would do the trick, but quickly conclude its accident-causing
capabilities end at a sprained ankle.
It’s been a month and still no blood. You watch as the school bus carrying
your sister barrels back to the rez, then catch a city bus to the walk-in clinic.
You haven’t had any symptoms—no breast soreness, no fatigue, no nausea
or vomiting—yet you know that tiny weight is there: unmoving, but alive.
You whisper to the receptionist what you need. The room is too small for
secrets. Other patients’ ears perk up and they give you the once-over, sure
the uncertain state of your uterus tells them all they need to know about
you.
“Ten dollars,” the receptionist says. You must look confused because her
eyebrows arch. “For the test.”
You fish a purple bill from the small yellow envelope in your purse. You
wait.
Eventually a man leads you into a room and asks you to pee into a clear
container, which is slightly alarming since you’ve never seen it happen this
way in movies. Then again, teenage sex doesn’t lead to pregnancy in most
movies, either.
You wait some more. Though there’s still no proof it’s even there, you
feel that tiny pebble of a person inside you so acutely: a little anchor
docking you to the reserve. With every passing minute, this future that was
supposed to belong to someone else—some cheap-beer-guzzling party girl
with no aspiration to do anything but keep her small waistline and have a
good time—takes solid shape before you. It doesn’t matter that you took
conscious effort to make yourself unfeminine, that you maintain a self-
imposed standard of sobriety, that you have plans to become a famous
writer immediately upon graduation. All your potential, all your plans, will
remain just that: frozen by time and circumstance. You’ll continue to work
an under-the-table job, lead an under-the-table life. This is how statistics are
born.
The man returns, confirming what you’ve known for weeks. He offers no
comment or congratulations. You’re thankful for this.
You wait to cry until you’re back on the bus. No one notices your
quaking shoulders, your muted sobs.
If you were in a silent movie right now the title card would ask the most
teenage of all questions: “Why me?”
The woman in front of you looks like the lead from Touched by an Angel.
Red hair, pale skin, perpetually wounded. Last week this woman gave you a
small book with purple lilacs on the cover. It was presented as a pregnant
teen’s diary, but it was written by a middle-aged woman with a poor grasp
of slang and an even worse grasp of grammar. As you read you made
revisions in bright blue pen.
The woman asks if you liked it. You pause. What she really wants to ask
is whether you’re considering abortion, which the “diary” has implied is a
moral decision on par with blowing up a hospital. You’re not sure if on-the-
spot exorcisms are a thing, but you suspect this woman could arrange one
for the very disturbed or the very feminist. You cautiously observe that the
book was “okay.”
She moves on, asking about your family history while Mike sits beside
you, shifting uncomfortably. You wonder how many other good, confirmed
Catholic girls she’s interrogated like this, how many families she’s boiled
down to a series of checkmarks on a page for the casual perusal of the
childless. So far your family has become diabetes, cancer, alcoholism, drug
addiction, cerebral palsy, mental illness.
“What kind of mental illness?” the woman asks, leaning forward. “It’s
important we’re specific so”—her voice drops a register—“the family
knows.” The family. She says it with such ominous singularity it calls to
mind the mafia.
You glance uneasily at Mike. He doesn’t know this part yet. No one does,
really. You don’t remember being outright told to keep it secret. Repression
was learned in your household as coolly as vocal tics or table manners. You
didn’t even whisper about it with your sister at night between bunks, and
you whispered with her about everything.
“What kind of mental illness, Alicia?”
“Bipolar disorder.” The words tumble strange and unpractised from your
mouth. These words, this diagnosis, is supposed to explain away your
mother’s erratic presence in your life. It seems unfair that so much pain can
be summed up so succinctly. Her illness—its stranglehold—feels much
bigger than six syllables.
It usually happens like this: your mother gets really sad or really angry,
and some days when you come home from school she’s gone. After a
month or two, she reappears just as suddenly, smiling and shiny and normal.
And no one talks about it. Then two or three months later the hospital cycle
starts back up again, and again, you find yourself the de facto mother of
four confused siblings—cooking cheap, unfortunate dinners, changing
diapers during Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s commercial breaks.
“Do you know what kind? There are different types…”
“I don’t know.” Your voice shakes. You clench your jaw and stare at the
spot directly between the woman’s eyebrows, trying not to blink. Her pores
are larger than yours, but smaller than your mother’s. Everything about
your mother is big: her voice, her smile, her mood swings, her devotion to
the Catholic Church, her love.
She cried even harder than you did when she found out. Not that you
delivered the news with much finesse. In the midst of a fight with both
parents, you screamed, “By the way, I’m pregnant!” just before slamming
the trailer door and stomping down the driveway to a waiting cab.
Since then, you’ve heard her mutter about sin repeating itself when she
thinks you can’t hear. Or maybe when she thinks you can. Her big sin was
having three kids out of wedlock before marrying your father. As her own
personal penance, she forced Catholicism on you and your siblings with an
almost supernatural zeal. But all the rosaries in the world couldn’t curb
teenage hormones or your pathological desire to please. Like mother, like
daughter.
“Is it in your immediate family?” the woman asks.
“Yes, it’s my mom. Can we please stop talking about it now?” Your face
is hot. Your mom’s sitting outside this windowless room right now,
probably clutching one of the many wrinkled tissues she keeps stowed in
her purse, smelling of pressed powder.
The woman smiles, leans further forward, places her hand on your knee
the way all women like this presume they’re allowed to place hands on a
stranger’s knees.
“I know this is hard for you and I don’t want to pry—” Stop the sentence
there, you think. Just stop. “But we need to know how many generations
back the bipolar goes. The family needs to know what they’re getting
themselves into. That type of disease is genetic.”
You first learned about genetics in grade eight. Dominant and recessive
genes. Chromosomes and DNA. You even did probability charts to
determine what your potential kids might look like. All of it seemed
exceedingly superficial. Who really cared if their baby had brown eyes
instead of blue? Curly hair or straight?
Until now, it never occurred to you that genes could be toxic, planting
illness like landmines in your child. One false step and your child’s brain—
your child’s life—could become bloodied pulp. You think of your mother
and her stop-start-stop-start life. Is she really happy? Does she remember
what she does when she’s in the throes of her illness? The names she calls
you when she’s manic? The times she’s been catatonic, too depressed to
even speak? Late one night, shortly after she got back from the hospital,
you remember her telling your dad about being strapped to a bed. She was
in the restraints for hours, screaming and crying. Eventually she wet herself.
She relayed the details calmly, clinically, as though they belonged to
someone else. Your father said nothing. You were starting to think he’d left
the room until you heard his voice, all thunder and annoyance. He was
trying to watch TV.
The memories rise unbidden, and it’s as if your body explodes. There is
no working up to it, no slow progression of emotion. You’re hysterical: face
now red with tears, breaths now hiccuping gasps.
The woman fumbles for a box of tissues as she stutters her apologies.
You realize all at once you hate her. She’s the type of woman who, a
handful of decades ago, would have carted your dad’s aunts and uncles off
to residential schools without batting an eye.
Then Mike tells the woman to stop. His sentences are short and
incontestable. Like the love interest in a John Hughes movie, he stands,
grabs your hand and leads you out of the room, then out of the building.
Apart from the teen pregnancy and the hyperventilating, you think this is
probably the most romantic thing that’s ever happened to you.
There are so few differences between idealism and arrogance. You thought
it would be easy to be a full-time student and a part-time mother, coming
home on weekends to nurse your baby and kiss your baby and try to
convince them they’re still your baby between reading strange novels and
writing eight-page essays. You thought it would be easy to integrate with
your classmates, building lifelong friendships with students as eager and
hungry and curious as you are.
Instead, you’ve replaced silence about your own mother with silence
about being a mother—a decision that leaves you mute, marooned in small
talk and superficiality. Everyone on your residence floor seems to be friends
except you. You don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy in the common room; you
don’t complain about unfair professors or restrictive meal plans. If this were
a movie, you’d be an extra. Scenery, even.
Not that you want to be friendless. You just know that if you were to
explain your situation to anyone, you’d compulsively search faces,
analyzing lip twitches and forehead creases, tracking judgment like a
bloodhound tracks game. It doesn’t matter that your floor has a co-ed
bathroom and you’ve heard so many of their drunken hookups that you’re
starting to recognize them by their coital grunts. That type of shame is
normal. They are normal. Your shame is not. You are not.
The one benefit to having almost no friends is you don’t have to make
excuses to run back to your dorm room and pump breast milk. Every four
hours you’re back in your bedroom with a glorified suction cup, watching
white drops trickle into a bottle, the contents of which you pour into a
Ziploc bag, seal on all sides with masking tape and pop into the freezer. At
first the milk comes easily; you’re done in fifteen minutes flat. But the
longer you’re away from your baby, the longer it takes. Soon it takes an
episode and a half of Veronica Mars to pump a measly four ounces. Your
frozen haul shrinks considerably. Mike’s mother still brags about your
dedication, as if you’re some lactating folk hero, but you’ve noticed opened
tins of Similac on her counter. The only thing you alone can provide for
your kid can be replaced for $24.95 at most shopping centres.
One day your gender studies class is discussing Toni Morrison’s
Beloved–specifically, the scene where Sethe kills her two-year-old daughter
rather than return her to a life of slavery. You remain silent as you listen to
your classmates (all of whom are young and childless, all of whom are
white) debate Sethe’s actions. What kind of mother does that to her child?
What kind of mother would want her child to be born into a life like that?
Bad mother, bad mother, bad mother.
Suddenly, your professor declares that mothers are the most hated group
of people in the world. He doesn’t elaborate, he just lets the statement sit.
Your stomach churns as you glance around at similarly slack-jawed
students. Despite the looks of confusion, and the general tendency for
university students to argue, no one protests. Not even you.
You mull over this statement for weeks. Your own mother was the stay-
at-home mom to seven kids in total, though one of them chose to live with
your grandmother after a custody battle and another was disabled, with very
little control over her muscles, so your mother put her in a home where they
could provide round-the-clock care. You’re not sure how much of any of
that was her choice. Since she’s been married, she’s been in and out of
hospitals too often to hold down a job. On top of that, she has the inglorious
distinction of being one of the few white illegal aliens on Six Nations. If
anyone reports her to band council, she’ll be not only kicked off the reserve
but deported. Her options have never really been options at all.
Still, for over a decade of your life, if she was ever tired or annoyed or
depressed or manic, your childish brain conveniently edited that out,
preferring to preserve her as an ever-smiling, ever-fertile saint. This
delusion was so strong, in fact, that until you were twelve you wanted to be
a stay-at-home mom, too. You imagined a motley crew of children
shrieking on the lawn and tugging at your legs and holding up their arms to
you in near-holy reverie. You, their blessed mother.
Of course your own blessed mother didn’t live just for you. She taught
herself computer languages, researched the latest advances in technology,
wrote up elaborate business plans and promised you wild wealth would be
yours within a year. But she could only ever do those things when you and
your siblings were at school. As soon as any of you got home, the battle for
her undivided attention began. Your brother would climb on her lap and
strategically position his face in front of the computer monitor, moving his
head to match hers whenever she tried to look around him. Your sister
would thrust tests and homework in her face, ask pointed questions, then
cry over her one-syllable responses. You would whine about how she never
really listened to you anymore, as though her ability to absorb middle-
school gossip trumped her attempts to program your family out of poverty.
At that time, at that age, it did. None of you hated your mother, but none of
you acknowledged she was her own person, either. Isn’t that its own sort of
hatred? Isn’t that why you won’t tell anyone about the child you left
behind?
Though Mike is sympathetic and supportive, he doesn’t seem to feel
nearly as guilty as you do. He still seems whole. You watch movies
together, you cuddle, you load into your father’s van and drive to his
mother’s house to see your baby on Friday nights. Though everyone back
home asks you about your child, no one ever asks him about his.
When you get back to Mike’s mom’s crowded apartment your baby is
asleep. You know that they’re a light sleeper, that you should leave them
alone, but it’s such a perfect moment. You bend down and kiss their
hairline. The wrinkles on their forehead ripple outward, then smooth. For a
moment it seems like you’re in the clear. Then their eyes burst open and
they let loose an unholy howl and you know that you messed up.
But a funny thing happens. Between their cries you hear their tiny
warbling voice say a word for the first time. It may be totally accidental,
two syllables randomly mashed together, and they may not know what it
means and they may only see you on weekends and your milk may have
dried up, leaving them with an overpriced instant substitute, but your baby
is looking at you now through clotted lashes, calling you Mama.
It’s not how you wanted it, but it’s enough.
THE SAME SPACE
very time I come back my blood runs a little faster through my veins.
Run through these streets, my instincts say, run your fingertips over
each brick of each building. Feel the roughness, the sturdiness, the strength.
Feel the sun and the particular way it cuts through the trees, warming your
neck, your arms, your legs before its unblinking attention becomes too
much and you go home sunburnt. Hear the night, which is never totally
silent—raccoons hissing or late-night, liquored-up strangers laughing or
street sweepers rumbling or delivery trucks beeping while backing up. See
the night, see how its darkness always has an escape hatch—a streetlight or
lit-up store sign to guide you home, even when the city’s radiance blocks out
the stars. Place your hand over this neighbourhood’s heart, feel it beat
against your palm. Love its perfection. Love its imperfection. Feel home
again.
But I’m not home again. Not really. Bloor and Lansdowne hasn’t been
my home for seven years. My brother Mikey, a freshly minted adult, is
moving here to go to school. It’ll be his home soon. I’m not one to believe
in fate, but I can recognize a good coincidence when I see one. This is
definitely a coincidence.
As we walk down the familiar streets together—past the Value Village,
the Coffee Time, the restaurants drawing us in with scents of curry and
coffee and cookies and chicken—I see his eyes go wide with possibility.
I’m sure mine did the same back then. I’m sure they’re doing the same now.
After all, few are immune to the shiny neon and collapsed boundaries of
big-city capitalism.
Mikey shows me his apartment. It’s small, like mine was, but at least its
floors are level. I know he’ll push against the smallness, the tightness, assert
himself within this space until he feels a sort of cozy comfort in its
claustrophobia. Our home on Six Nations was small, too, but we had whole
fields of green to explore, thick forests to investigate, a browning creek to
stick our toes in or rush across.
Though the green here is mostly confined to small patches around
houses, sometimes lounging luxuriously across a handful of parks, in its
place lies a different sort of freedom: anonymity. Toronto is so big, this
neighbourhood so busy and full, one’s personal history gets lost in its
frenzy. Back on the rez, both Mikey and I were Wes’s kids, the newest links
in a chain of history that reached back much farther than anyone ever
bothered to explain to us. But here, among all these people who don’t know
your name or face or history, you can just be you. Unbuckle your
uncomfortable past, the city murmurs. Pack it tight in a box and shove it in
the back of your closet. Stretch your newly unburdened shoulders. Choose
your own adventure.
I was still in school when I lived here, finishing an English lit degree,
taking hour-long transit rides to York University, where I would read and
dream my name would one day be boldly printed down book spines, too. I
took a class on diaspora literatures, attracted by the elusive promise of
actual Indigenous writers on a course syllabus. It was difficult, combining
complex theory with complex books. On top of that, my professor was
blindingly, intimidatingly smart—the type of person who mercilessly
dissected any answer to any question she posed, and therefore terrified
everyone into silence for a few seconds whenever she spoke.
“Why do you think I included Indigenous literature in a diaspora
course?” she asked one day.
I surprised myself by answering without a second’s hesitation. “Because
Indigenous people are almost always put in the position where they’re
displaced on their own lands.”
My professor didn’t dissect anything. She simply smiled, impressed. I
knew I should have felt proud that she approved, and I did, but I also felt a
pressure building in my chest—one that perhaps was always there, but
hidden away, like my own past.
I’d always been close-lipped about my family life—the violence, the joys,
the poverty, the precariousness. Part of this was because my family moved
so often. I knew better than to offer the sort of vulnerabilities upon which
lifelong friendships are built; I was only going to move again, anyway. The
other reason was that I knew that my family wasn’t a normal, charming,
made-for-TV type of dysfunctional. We were the type of dysfunctional
where the police could be called on our parents, by our parents; where
social services could be knocking on our door if we said the wrong thing to
a teacher, or even if we didn’t say anything at all, as though there were
some sort of aura hanging around us that everyone identified as wrong.
How could a seven-year-old explain any of this to another seven-year-
old? A fourteen-year-old to a fourteen-year-old? An eighteen-year-old to an
eighteen-year-old? I can’t even write this now without feeling like I have to
make excuses for my family, to explain that despite all the dysfunction and
trauma, each of my siblings was raised with so much love and self-
confidence that we’re all now, as adults, doing well in our chosen fields,
and even if we weren’t, we still deserve to be considered more than our
dysfunction and trauma, we still deserve to be considered valuable, whole.
Instead of attempting to explain any of this to any friends, I learned how
to fake intimacy. Turned out that as long as you were funny and fun, people
would want to spend time with you; as long as you were willing to listen to
their problems, they didn’t notice you weren’t telling them any of your own.
I knew so much about my friends. They knew almost nothing about me.
This was how I created a double life: no matter how awful things were at
home, I could go to school and, from nine to three, pretend that nothing at
all was wrong. But once 3:01 hit and I got on the bus home, I could no
longer stop myself from wondering what awaited me when I got off.
There was a problem with this strategy that I didn’t anticipate. The longer
I went without talking to my friends about my problems, the harder it was
to talk to them when I actually needed to. If I had slowly unspooled my life
for them, as they had for me, they would be prepared when something
particularly difficult came up. They would already know the context. Now,
if I wanted to talk to them about anything, I would have to explain
everything—all the truth I’d tried so hard to keep from everyone. I had no
idea how to go about that, so instead I just continued on as I always had: the
girl without a family or past, who you could always rely on to keep all your
secrets because she kept her own so well.
This is not the same neighbourhood I left all those years ago. Time passes
and spaces change, whether you’re there to witness it or not. Here, at Bloor
and Lansdowne, gentrification is now in full swing. Bloor West is now the
proud owner of shiny new vegan bakeries and boutique cafés—ventures
that seemed unthinkable when these streets held me close. A few
restaurants and businesses have already abandoned the area, the trendiness
they helped create now turning on them, pricing them out.
In Leslie Jamison’s essay “Fog Count,” she goes to visit a friend in
prison and, while there, realizes her experience of the prison as a visitor will
never be the same as his as an inmate: “The truth is we never occupied the
same space. A space isn’t the same for a person who has chosen to be there
and a person who hasn’t.” Jamison can ask as many probing questions as
she wants, can write down all the details, but she will always, in effect, be a
tourist in that space because she can always choose to leave.
I wonder if the people who are choosing to bring money into this
neighbourhood, choosing to paint over its poverty, swat away its seediness,
transform it into something shiny, clean and appealing to upper-middle-
class families, recognize they, too, are tourists, inviting in more tourists to
take advantage of its low rent and subway access, encouraging them to
make homes where homes were already made. They see the neighbourhood
as a big red X on a treasure map, and, shovel in hand, are determined to
mine its bounty from beneath the beds of the natives. Meanwhile, those
who live here because they have to, who have always made the most of
what they’ve begrudgingly been given, are now being told that their
achievements in this space are not enough, that they haven’t used the space
properly, haven’t realized its “potential,” and must leave to make room for
“progress.” They see the neighbourhood as their home—a space that
already has inherent worth, whether outsiders recognize that worth or not.
Or, as Jamison might say, the same space, but also not the same at all.
In my diaspora class we often talked about the experience of diaspora:
remembering your past in your former home and constantly measuring it
against your present in your current home, knowing you can never again re-
enter the time and space you left, knowing you have lost access to that
possible future forever, knowing your home will change without you,
knowing you will change without your home—and knowing, in some
instances, none of that was your choice.
Jamison wasn’t exactly right. There aren’t only two ways to consider a
place. It isn’t just about those who choose to be there and those who don’t.
What about those who had never chosen not to be there? What about those
who were forced out?
Tucked away in a box at the back of this city’s closet is a history. The
history is this: Toronto was once Tkaronto. This city ruled by bylaws was
once ruled by treaty. It was Dish With One Spoon territory: a space that was
shared by my people, the Haudenosaunee, the Mississaugas of the New
Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Huron, the Wendat. This land was not
supposed to have its plenty mined and discarded; it was supposed to be
treated as one collective dish each nation had to share, hunting an equal but
sustainable amount of game. All would eat from that dish together, using a
beaver tail spoon instead of a knife to ensure there was no accidental
bloodshed—which might lead to intentional bloodshed. In this way, it was a
space of mutual peace and prosperity.
But early settlers approached the land with the eyes of enterprising
tourists: looking at its green, its forests, its waters—and seeing a big red X.
They forced out the lands’ native inhabitants and went about realizing this
land’s “potential,” laying roads and constructing buildings, later putting up
condos and converting old restaurants into cafés.
It was the same space, but also not the same at all.
Before Bloor West had a chance to push me out, Six Nations pulled me
back in. That box at the back of my own closet, that box holding my history
tight, that I hadn’t opened for anyone my entire life, wouldn’t stop
whispering to me. Don’t forget, it said. Don’t forget like this city forgot.
Don’t make the same mistakes this city keeps making.
While I was taking a fiction and creative nonfiction course in my last
year of university, my past started to overwhelm my work. It was as though
all the things I didn’t know how to say out loud were storming the page,
well past ready to finally be articulated. After all those years of forcing my
past behind a dam, the pieces I was writing were like a flood. Readers
weren’t invited in so much as they were drowned, carried by the tide of my
trauma to endings that felt like gasps for air. One friend told me an essay I’d
written as a letter to my mother made her feel incredibly uncomfortable,
like she shouldn’t be reading it. In a way, she was right. She shouldn’t have
been reading it. It wasn’t so much a piece of creative nonfiction as it was an
exorcism. If no one could handle how intense that was, fine. I needed to
figure out how to talk about my past the only way I could: by writing it.
No trace of Indigenous history is etched into these sidewalks, illuminated
by these streetlights, cemented between these bricks—not when I lived here
years ago, and not today. That past is still packed up, forgotten.
Descendants of this land’s original caretakers are still here, though. We’re
laughing with our friends outside the movie theatre, or trying to get by
selling dreamcatchers at Bloor and Spadina, or dancing in our regalia at the
tiny but perfect powwow at Dufferin Grove Park, or reading on the subway
on the way to school. We’re here, in diaspora on our own lands. We’re
watching as the same exploitive process that pushed our people out
centuries ago continues to push out others today—an updated version with
different copyrights attached.
Whenever I visit my brother, I’ll walk the streets of Bloor and
Lansdowne and remember what it felt like to finally be able to talk openly
about my past. How I felt a relief I’d never known until then, because I
could finally be seen for who I was, known for who I was, loved for who I
was. I’ll observe the neighbourhood with the warm nostalgia and cool
distance of a former lover: measuring the present against the past, frowning
at disappointing changes, smiling at positive ones, ultimately hopeful.
Perhaps one day this neighbourhood, this city, this country, will finally hear
its neglected past whispering, Look at me plainly. Look at me. Look at your
patterns. Don’t make the same mistakes. Don’t hide who you were.
Acknowledge it, then make something new, something beautiful, something
that will make everyone proud.
DARK MATTERS
o say dark matter was “discovered” is disingenuous since, theoretically,
dark matter has always been here, filling space we once thought of as
empty. In that way it’s not so different from the lands my people refer to as
Turtle Island. To this day, people claim the Americas were “discovered” in
1492, despite people living on these lands, creating on these lands, building
histories on these lands for centuries before Columbus ambled along.
Approximately one-fifth of the world’s human population made their home
on Turtle Island at the time, not including all the species of plants, animals,
birds and fish those people cared for. It takes a certain kind of arrogance to
assume that an entire continent didn’t exist before you chose to see it.
My family and I had just sat down in a Starbucks when I found out. I
opened Twitter, looked at my mentions. An acquaintance had tagged me
and a number of Indigenous people I knew. Three words were written at the
end of the list: “I’m so sorry.” Nothing more needed to be said. I knew at
that moment white Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley had been found
innocent of all charges related to his killing of twenty-two-year-old nêhiyaw
man Colten Boushie.
There’s never a good time to get news that breaks you, but sitting in a
Starbucks with your family in the midst of a vacation seems particularly
inopportune. My husband and child were visiting Vancouver while I was on
a fellowship at a major university. We’d visited the Contemporary Art
Gallery that day. The main exhibit, “Two Scores,” was split between rooms.
In the first room were Vancouver artist Brent Wadden’s giant woven
blankets, which he apparently insists on calling “paintings.” They lacked
the artistry of the Squamish weavings we’d seen a few days before at the
Museum of Anthropology. The gallery write-up, however, spun this
messiness into a positive, describing Wadden’s self-taught weavings as
“exploratory…purposefully naïve”—even if they were “often inefficient…
[and] would confound a traditionally-trained practitioner.” I wondered
whether this artist, who lived and worked on unceded Musqueam,
Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory, had any idea of the Squamish
history of weaving. I wondered if he’d care that Squamish blankets were
placed in an anthropology museum while his were given a solo exhibit in a
respected art gallery.
Some things only matter when a white man does them.
Cynical and unimpressed, we left the gallery to wander towards Granville
Island. We spent nearly an hour in a specialty stamp store. We tried terrible
virtual reality, which made my eleven-year-old cry. We had fake ketchup
sprayed at us by the owner of a magic shop, which annoyed me but made
my husband and eleven-year-old absolutely giddy. We ate perogies and cake
crafted to look like the Pride flag. It was, all in all, a pretty tame tourist
experience. We only stopped at the Starbucks so we could use free Wi-Fi to
map our trip back to our hotel room.
Then I saw the tweet. As I sat there reading the first article I could find, a
lump lodged in my throat. Colten Boushie, who was a firekeeper, who
would mow the lawns of elders in his community, whose friends were
trying to get away from Gerald Stanley’s farm shortly before Stanley’s gun
fired into the back of Boushie’s head, would receive no justice. His family
would know no peace.
As soon as the story of Boushie’s death came to light, Gerald Stanley
came to be considered something of a folk hero among white rural
Canadians. He’d done what they all seemed willing—or even eager—to do:
kill an Indian. Stanley’s rationale—or lack thereof—didn’t matter. The fact
that Boushie was an important part of his community didn’t matter. All that
mattered was Stanley had killed an Indian, and like the Hollywood cowboys
his actions emulated, he deserved not only his freedom but a bounty. Over
the next few days, he’d get one. His GoFundMe page amassed over
$100,000 within seventy-two hours.
Some things don’t matter when a white man does them.
The first person to realize dark matter existed was Fritz Zwicky, an
astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. In the 1930s, he was
studying orbit patterns within the Coma Cluster, a cluster of over a
thousand galaxies. Zwicky tried to calculate the mass of the cluster based
on its velocity, which should have been straightforward using the virial
theorem and Isaac Newton’s theories on gravity. What he found, however,
was that there was much more matter in the cluster than the light of its stars
suggested. There was something unaccounted for that couldn’t be seen.
Zwicky called this mysterious, invisible force “dark matter.”
The lump in my throat grew the entire bus ride home. I felt like I was going
to vomit. I thought about Debbie Baptiste, who, upon hearing her son had
died, screamed and collapsed to the ground. The RCMP, who were
searching her house without her consent, asked if she was drunk. When you
aren’t seen as human, your human emotions are no longer relatable but
indecipherable—evidence you’re unstable or an animal or a drunk.
The injustice of Colten’s death; the injustice of Colten’s friends not only
witnessing his murder but getting arrested; the injustice of Stanley drinking
coffee with his family while Colten’s body grew cold in their yard; the
injustice of Debbie Baptiste’s grief being read as drunkenness by RCMP
officers tearing apart her house; the injustice of so many white Canadians
referring to Colten as a criminal when Stanley was the one on trial for
murder—it had all simmered inside for a year. And when I read that verdict
and understood that, even in this era of so-called reconciliation, Canadians
would continue to see Indigenous people as worthless criminals, and that
pain finally, finally boiled over, I wanted to cry or scream or collapse. But I
couldn’t. I was in a Starbucks, then I was on a bus. Public pain was
impolite. Someone could think I was drunk. Someone could call the cops. I
kept myself composed, the way society expected me to; I tried to smile and
laugh, the way society expected me to. My body was sharp glass I dutifully
held together.
A few Indigenous friends told me later they couldn’t sleep after the
verdict. All I wanted to do was sleep. Plunge headfirst into a dreamscape
where my family, friends and community weren’t seen as disposable, where
our deaths mattered, where our lives mattered. As long as I was dreaming,
we could be respected and loved and seen as human.
I slept for nearly twelve hours that night.
In 1973, Princeton astronomers Jeremiah Ostriker and James Peebles were
studying how galaxies evolve. They built a computer simulation of a galaxy
using a technique called N-body simulation. What they found, however,
was that they couldn’t recreate the elliptical or spiral shapes observable in
most galaxies—until they added a uniform distribution of invisible mass.
Suddenly, with the introduction of this dark matter, things reacted the way
Ostriker and Peebles expected them to. Things started to make sense.
As Ostriker and Peebles were doing their simulations, astronomers Kent
Ford and Vera Cooper Rubin were studying the motion of stars in the
Andromeda galaxy at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. They
measured the velocity of hydrogen gas clouds in and around the galaxy,
expecting those outside the visible edge of the galaxy to be moving at a
much slower rate than those on the edge. But the rate of velocity was the
same.
For this to be the case, there had to be a considerable amount of dark
matter both outside the edge of the Andromeda galaxy and within the
galaxy itself. Rubin concluded that, despite dark matter’s invisibility, it
must be there—and in levels that increased the farther from the galactic
centre one got. It would appear that dark matter was affecting the entire
universe.
APTN, a news organization that focuses on Indigenous issues, reported on a
Facebook post by an unnamed RCMP officer regarding the Stanley verdict.
“This should never have been allowed to be about race,” the officer wrote.
“Crimes were committed and a jury found the man not guilty in protecting
his home and family….Too bad the kid died but he got what he deserved.”
Colten Boushie was sleeping when the SUV he was in pulled up to
Gerald Stanley’s farm. As far as we know from the testimony of both sides,
he didn’t try to steal anything. He never even left the vehicle. We would
later learn his friends had attempted to break into another car earlier that
day, after they realized theirs had a flat. But at the time, Stanley didn’t
know this. He saw them pull up, he heard Colten’s friend get on an ATV
and attempt to start it. This was all it took for Stanley’s son to run at the
SUV with a hammer and smash the windshield. Stanley himself kicked out
the taillight before going to get his gun.
I have a feeling the Stanleys’ actions were not what the RCMP officer
was referring to when he or she said “crimes were committed,” though their
damaging the SUV was, in fact, criminal and could be considered mischief
under the Criminal Code of Canada. No, I have a feeling the officer was
referring to the actions of Boushie’s friends and their failed attempts at
theft, despite the Criminal Code of Canada stating that theft is only
completed once a person who intends to steal an item causes it to move.
Since neither the car nor the ATV moved, theft did not occur. Still, the
RCMP officer claims the violent, gun-toting Stanley was “protecting his
home and family” and Colten “got what he deserved.”
The first time I stole I was in grade four. My family had just moved to
Painesville, Ohio, from the motel in Cleveland we’d been living in. Before
that, we’d been living at a Salvation Army shelter in Buffalo, New York.
You could say we were moving up in the world, though moving up from
nothing doesn’t require much.
There was a convenience store a few blocks from the mostly empty
house we were renting. It sold twenty-five-cent Little Debbie pastries,
which my sister, brother and I loved. My favourite were Fudge Rounds—
two chocolate cookies smashed together with chocolate cream in the
middle, drizzled with fudge. My siblings loved Oatmeal Creme Pies, which
were pretty much the same as Fudge Rounds except with oatmeal cookies
and vanilla cream. I don’t recall exactly when I decided we should steal
them, but I knew that I wanted to make my siblings happy. I knew that we
didn’t have a lot of reasons to be happy. Little Debbie pastries seemed as
good a reason as any.
If I bought something at the store, I reasoned, I’d be less suspicious. You
can’t be both a thief and a patron—or so I hoped the store clerks thought.
My siblings and I would scan the streets for pennies, nickels and dimes, dig
through couch cushions and crawl under car seats until we had twenty-five
cents. Then we’d pull off the heist—taking far more pastries than we
wanted when the clerk was looking, sticking a few in our pockets when she
wasn’t, then putting the rest back before settling on just one to buy.
The first few times it went well. Everyone in our neighbourhood looked
poor; we fit in completely. When we moved to Mentor, Ohio, however—a
much richer city—we were no longer just another poor mixed-race family
in a community of poor mixed-race families; we were the poor mixed-race
family in a white, middle-class community, living well outside our means.
The first time I tried to pull off a pastry heist there, I was caught. The
clerk’s eyes were on my sister and me as soon as we stepped in the door—
taking in our stringy, uncut hair, our ill-fitting, donated clothes. She
followed us around the store. She wasn’t subtle about it. When my sister
and I came to the cash register, the clerk said she knew we were stealing.
She’d seen us pocketing treats in the reflection in the window. She looked
at us with such disgust. She couldn’t tell we were Indigenous, but she could
tell we were incredibly poor.
The total cost of our attempted theft was no more than five dollars.
Probably closer to three. It was almost nothing, but it was enough. We were
no longer an eight- and ten-year-old under this woman’s gaze; we were not
sad kids trying to cope with poverty and abuse. We were thieves, criminals.
Not-quite-humans who would one day get what we deserved.
But what did we deserve? To go to some juvenile detention facility and
have our responses to poverty punished? How would her reaction have
changed if we were visibly Indigenous? Would she have called the cops
then and there, as opposed to giving us the chance to leave and “wise up”?
Did our white skin give us a chance at redemption my brown cousins
wouldn’t have gotten under the same circumstances?
When Stanley looked at Colten, did his face resemble that clerk’s face
when she looked at my sister and me? Was the same disgust curling his lip?
The same sense of righteousness? Did he think of himself as some modern-
day cowboy keeping the savage Indians at bay?
Unlike my sister and me, Colten didn’t steal anything. So what did
Colten, a twenty-two-year-old nêhiyaw man, deserve? To be killed after a
day out with friends? To have the white man who fired the bullet that
ultimately led to his death cleared of all legal and criminal responsibility for
killing him? How is any of this “not about race”?
I suppose, in one sense, the RCMP officer is right. This should never
have been allowed to be about race. Stanley and his son shouldn’t have
grown up in a society where Indians are portrayed as the biggest threat to
life in the prairies, where cowboys killing Indians is viewed as heroic and
worthy of hundreds of films, where the success of this country was
dependent upon how close Canada was to enacting “the final solution of our
Indian Problem.” Perhaps if those things hadn’t been allowed to have been
made about race, Colten and his friends might have felt comfortable asking
white people like Stanley for help when they first got a flat tire, knowing
that even though they’d been drinking, they’d still be seen as people who
needed help and not just drunken Indians and potential threats. Or, if Colten
and his friends were making reckless decisions—the types of decisions
young people sometimes make, regardless of whether they’re drinking or
not—the punishment would be less severe and more humane than death by
vigilante.
Maybe, if none of the history of Canada or Saskatchewan were allowed
to be about race, Colten would still be here today.
According to NASA’S website, despite over forty-five years of vigorous
research since 1973, “We are much more certain what dark matter is not
than we are what it is.”
It is not in the form of stars or planets. It is not in the form of dark clouds
or normal matter. It is not antimatter or black holes. It is not any of these
things. It is always something else.
Perhaps we can’t see dark matter because we don’t know what to look
for. Perhaps we can’t see it because we don’t know how to look.
The next morning the lump in my throat was still there, and my family was
still, technically, on vacation. We’d had plans for a full day in the city,
ending with a trip to the HR MacMillan Space Centre and observatory. The
Stanley verdict changed everything. I didn’t have the energy to keep
pretending I was a blissful tourist on unceded, stolen Indigenous land. I
didn’t have the privilege to forget what the Stanley verdict meant for my
family, friends, community. I wanted to be around people who were
mourning with me, who felt that deep, inescapable sorrow threatening to
swallow us all.
My eleven-year-old was on the hotel room bed watching TV. I lay down
next to them, took a deep breath, and explained the Stanley case, as every
Indigenous parent no doubt did that morning. I told them that I was going to
go to a rally to support justice for the Boushie family, that they didn’t have
to come if they didn’t want to.
“No, Mom, I want to come,” they said. I nearly burst into tears, hugged
them to my chest. I thanked genetics for giving them white skin to protect
them from the racism that has killed both my visibly Indigenous grandfather
and my visibly Indigenous uncle, felt sick that this was something I had to
be thankful for. No one should have to feel thankful that their child isn’t
dark-skinned.
“We’ll still go to the space centre later,” I promised.
The vacation would go on, the way the rest of the world had.
My kid, my husband and I shivered in the cold outside the CBC Vancouver
building. It felt fitting that the rally started there. A year and a half earlier,
just three days after Colten’s death, CBC Saskatoon chose to publish an
editorial on Canadians’ right to defend property, carelessly framing Colten’s
death as potentially justifiable before any information was really known
about the case. CBC Ombudsman Esther Enkin even defended this article,
claiming that since the RCMP hadn’t immediately laid charges against
Stanley, and three of Colten’s friends had been taken into custody for
potential “property-related offences,” the self-defence argument was part of
public discourse. Apparently CBC had a responsibility to the public to offer
“diverse perspectives”—though Enkin did admit that a line in the article
that implied self-defence would form the backbone of the criminal
proceedings was unclear and misleading.
By now, we know that Stanley’s lawyer knew better than to claim the
fifty-four-year-old was defending himself against a group of teenagers
trying to drive away from him and his hammer-wielding son on a flat tire;
that a just-woken twenty-two-year-old posed any significant threat to a man
trying to commandeer their vehicle while holding a gun. By now we also
know that Stanley’s lawyer never had to make that argument in the
courtroom. Others were already making it for him. It materialized on social
media, in Facebook posts and online comments made largely by white
Canadians. It materialized in a resolution to call for the federal government
to expand self-defence laws in Canada, passed by 92 percent of the
Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities less than a month after
Colten’s death. It materialized in my Twitter mentions when I posted anger
and pain at the injustice of Stanley’s acquittal. It was everywhere, all the
time. In that sense, I suppose we could have started the rally outside nearly
any building in Canada and it would have had the same symbolic effect.
Over three hundred people turned out that day. Speaker after speaker
came to the front of the crowd, ranging from the Skatin and Sts’ailes dancer
and missing and murdered Indigenous women advocate Lorelei Williams,
to Stō:lo/St’át’imc/Nlaka’pamux multimedia artist and hip hop musician
Ronnie Dean Harris, to Sapotaweyak Cree Nation slam poetry champion
and artist jaye simpson. Some people were passing out traditional medicines
to the crowd. Some were handing out red ribbons for people to wrap around
their arms in solidarity. Some were taking around smudge, filling the air
with the warm, comforting scent of sage. Some carried photos of Colten
they’d printed out before coming.
Even though I was only standing in a crowd, even though I was only
marching through Vancouver streets, even though I was only lighting
candles on the steps of the courthouse where we eventually stopped, it felt
good to be doing something with my body. It felt good to think there was a
plan others had laid out for me, and all I had to do was follow it. It felt good
that there was a place to hold my pain, my child’s pain, that other
Indigenous people had made this space for us.
“When I say ‘Justice,’ you say ‘For Colten,’ ” Nuxalk and Onondaga hip
hop artist JB The First Lady called to us.
“Justice!”
“For Colten!”
“Justice!”
“For Colten!”
My kid, my husband and I yelled until we were hoarse. Our voices, it
seemed, were all we could give—that, and ten dollars towards speaker
rentals.
It’s strange to think that most of the matter in the universe is invisible. We
know dark matter exists, we see its effects, but we cannot point to it and
say, “There it is! That’s dark matter! Look at it! I told you it existed!”
Maybe our single-minded focus on the light makes us unable to see the
dark that’s all around, always. Like when you turn off the lights in a bright
room and, for the first few seconds, you can’t make out shapes you saw so
clearly moments before. In those first few seconds of dark, your eyes would
have you believe there’s nothing else there. But your eyes are wrong.
Something is there, whether you see it or not.
The first recorded use of the word “racism” was in 1902. The man who
used it was an American named Richard Henry Pratt. He was criticizing
racial segregation, arguing that it “[killed] the progress of the segregated
people” and that all classes and races should come together to “destroy
racism and classism.”
But, as writer Gene Demby points out, “Although Pratt might have been
the first person to inveigh against racism and its deleterious effects by
name, he is much better-remembered for a very different coinage: Kill the
Indian…save the man.”
Pratt was what might be called a benevolent racist. Unlike his more
extreme contemporaries, Pratt believed that there was no need to kill all
Indians, that the problem was not Indians themselves but “all the Indian
there is in the race.” In other words, he wanted the same thing that Canada
has wanted for centuries: assimilation. He even advocated for Indian
boarding schools, the United States’ version of residential schools,
ultimately creating the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School out of an
abandoned military post. Indigenous children were taken from their homes
and forced to speak English, wear Western clothing, cut their hair, forsake
their ceremonies and traditions. They were told to be ashamed of being
Indigenous, to be ashamed of their own families. Many could not
communicate with their parents when they went home, if they went home at
all. Many were abused. Many were malnourished. Many got sick. Many
died.
These stories filter through our families, told in actions more than words
—each former student now raising their own kids the way their boarding
school teachers had raised them. A legacy of shame and violence, trauma
and pain, passed on from generation to generation like so many secrets.
And this from the mind of a man who spoke out against segregation and
racism.
If Pratt had lived to see the impact of his life’s work, I wonder if he
would feel remorse. If he would see that what he did to Indigenous families
was another form of the segregation and racism he claimed to denounce. I
wonder if, upon hearing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of
Canada refer to residential schools as “cultural genocide,” he’d realize that
he was responsible for that exact thing in America, and apologize until his
vocal cords stopped working.
More than likely, though, he’d just tell us we had it coming. That what he
did wasn’t racist at all, and we shouldn’t be allowed to make any of this
about race.
When we finally got to the HR MacMillan Space Centre, the sky was too
cloudy to see any stars at the observatory. Instead my husband, my kid and I
decided to head into the planetarium to watch a film called “Phantom of the
Universe: The Search for Dark Matter.” We leaned back and stared at a
giant dome screen as Tilda Swinton explained the origins of the universe to
us.
Dark matter forms the skeleton of our universe.
Dark matter doesn’t emit light or reflect it. That’s why scientists can’t
detect it.
The dark matter particle doesn’t let anything stand in its way.
I wondered how something could be so pervasive, so all-encompassing,
responsible for the world as we know it, and still not be able to be clearly
seen.
Then I remembered what Gerald Stanley’s lawyer said about Colten’s
murder in his closing argument: “It’s a tragedy, but it’s not criminal.” I
remembered the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities trying
to push for stronger self-protection laws while simultaneously denying the
influence the Boushie murder had had on this decision. I remembered the
white people on Twitter flooding Indigenous people’s accounts with racist
slurs; claims that Stanley was acting in self-defence; claims that Colten was
a criminal who had it coming; that Stanley’s white lawyer dismissing all
visibly Indigenous people from the jury as soon as he saw them was not
racist; that an all-white jury finding Stanley innocent of any wrongdoing
when he shot Colten point-blank in the head was not racist; that none of this
was racist. I remembered all the times I’ve pointed out racism in my life
and the white people around me claimed I was imagining it. I remembered
that, eventually, I started to wonder if I really was imagining it. I am always
made to feel as if I am imagining it.
To these people, the only words, actions or thoughts that can be
considered real racism are those they can’t be blamed for. Could any one of
them point to an instance of racism they’d witnessed today? This week?
This month? Could they listen to you describe one you’ve witnessed and
not stare blankly until you doubted your own perceptions, your own sanity?
I’m writing this less than a week after yet another unjust verdict. Raymond
Cormier was the fifty-six-year-old white man accused of murdering Tina
Fontaine, a fifteen-year-old Anishinaabe girl from Sagkeeng First Nation.
Tina’s seventy-two-pound body was found in Winnipeg’s Red River,
weighted down with rocks and wrapped in a comforter that witnesses claim
Cormier owned. After decades of grassroots work by Indigenous women
and family members went unrecognized, Tina’s death finally brought the
issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirited
people into Canada’s national consciousness. This is racism, Canada finally
seemed able to say. This is wrong.
Then came the trial. In recordings, Cormier talked about how he had sex
with Tina, how he was furious that she was only fifteen, how he was
worried he’d be imprisoned if the cops found out he’d slept with her. He
was seen fighting with Tina after he sold her bike for drug money. She
threatened to call the cops on him for stealing a truck. In the recordings,
Cormier seems to admit that he killed her. Still, he was found innocent. His
lawyer didn’t even have to offer a defence. He called no witnesses, offered
no evidence. I suppose he didn’t have to. The evidence washed away in the
river.
Police officers, emergency workers and social workers saw Tina the day
she died. When police pulled over the truck she was in, they ran her name
and saw that she was the subject of a missing person report, but they didn’t
help her. They left her there. When she was found hours later sleeping
between cars in a parking lot, paramedics took her to the hospital. The
doctor expressed concern that Tina was being sexually exploited, reportedly
urging Tina not to run away from Child and Family Services, but still
discharged her. From there, Tina’s social worker took her to eat some
McDonald’s and set her up at a new hotel room. She encouraged Tina to
stay on the premises, but later said there was no way to stop her from
leaving if she wanted to. Then she drove away. Tina’s great-aunt Thelma
Favel wasn’t informed any of the four times her niece went missing while
in CFS’s custody. When Favel called on August 15 to check on Tina, her
social worker said she’d been missing for two weeks. The woman had
apparently forgotten to tell Favel. Two days later Tina, who once wanted to
grow up to be a CFS worker, was found dead. But none of this is evidence
of racism, I suppose. It never is.
When I heard the Cormier verdict, my family was back in Brantford. I
was alone in a residence room waiting for the verdict to be announced. As
soon as my phone started buzzing, I knew what had happened. What had
happened again, and will no doubt happen again and again and again and
again to Indigenous people in this country.
Racism, for many people, seems to occupy space in very much the same
way as dark matter: it forms the skeleton of our world, yet remains
ultimately invisible, undetectable. This is convenient. If nothing is racism,
then nothing needs to be done to address it. We can continue on as usual.
Answer emails. Teach classes. Go to dinner with our families. Go to space
centres. Continue our vacations, untroubled. We can keep our eyes shut
inside this dark room we’ve created and pretend that, as long as we can’t
see what’s around us, there’s nothing around us at all. After all, there’s no
proof of it. If the man who coined the term “racism” can despise everything
that makes me Indian and get away with it, why the hell can’t you?
SCRATCH
ost people’s memories of their childhood are lush with sensory details:
your mother’s thick, slightly sweet spaghetti sauce; your grandfather’s
persistent smell of tobacco and oranges; the tiny “hmph” your sister made
whenever one of her elaborate lies was unravelled. For me, there is one
consistent detail and, unfortunately, it’s far from romantic: my childhood
itches. This makes sense, since I had head lice for over a decade. My
relationship with head lice was, until recently, the longest relationship I’d
ever had. Since the age of eight my fingernails were constantly scraping
against my scalp, my hands always feeling, unseeing, for tiny eggs like seed
beads strung on the strands of my thick, frizzy hair. Through state lines,
too-small rental properties, homeless shelters and motel rooms, all the way
to a trailer on the Six Nations reserve, those bugs nestled in the nape of my
neck were the one constant in my life. I hated them but, in a way, I almost
empathized with them. As a poor, mixed-race kid, I was treated like a
parasite, too. I was unnecessary, unwanted, a social bloodsucker. I needed
to be eradicated.
I first caught head lice at my grandparents’ sprawling property on the rez.
We were there visiting for the powwow. A ridiculous number of relatives
came; tents popped up on the front lawn like dandelions. Though my
cousins came down every summer, it was my first time being there.
Needless to say, I felt a bit out of place. My mother did nothing to ease my
fears, muttering about how my siblings and I were being treated differently
because we were half-white. I had numerous cousins who were half-white,
so I’m not sure how she justified this, but it added to my eight-year-old
sense of loneliness nonetheless.
The first night, our parents drank beer and played radio bingo—or most
of our parents. My mother was devoutly sober, a trait that further isolated
her from her in-laws. The kids, meanwhile, were everywhere: hanging from
the tire swing in the front yard, throwing brush into a bonfire precariously
situated on the side of a hill, catching crayfish and catfish in the meagre
depths of the creek. My six-year-old sister Missy and I took up with my
fiery, hilarious six-year-old cousin Melita. She was basically the only one
who acknowledged our existence. All our other cousins were already part of
well-established family cliques, so familiar with one another it was like
they were speaking their own language. We spent all our time together:
playing hide and go seek, pulling wood ticks off one another’s legs, running
from stray rez dogs. When Melita asked if she could sleep in our tent that
night, it was a revelation of sorts. You are wanted. You belong.
The next day we all started scratching.
That fall, after much pushing and persuasion, Mom finally got what she had
been asking for for years: Dad agreed to let my sister and me leave Native
American Magnet School #19—the only school in the city we could learn
our culture—and enrol in a private Catholic school, which would be paid
for with the help of my grandmother.
I became the new kid, a designation I’d wear like a runner-up sash for the
next ten years. At Magnet School #19 my sister and I managed to fly under
the radar because the poverty was widespread; there were levels. As long as
there were kids poorer and more socially awkward than us, we were safe.
At this school, in this two-floored, wide-lawned part of town, it was just us.
Luckily we wore uniforms, so it was hard to tell exactly how dirt poor we
were. I tried to make myself so likeable that economics didn’t matter,
making jokes and faking a crush on John, the fourth-grader all the girls in
my class obsessively pined after. He reminded me of a prepubescent Pat
Sajak and had the personality of a broom handle, but I was so desperate to
be accepted I didn’t care. I hastily replaced my surname with his and
scribbled it everywhere—my folders, my desk, my arms. The Catholic
schoolgirls were impressed.
That victory was tempered by an even bigger defeat. While my parents
made intermittent payments for my private schooling, they didn’t pay rent
on our house, so within a few months we were homeless. At that time my
family included my mother and father, myself, Missy, my older half-sister
Teena and my two-year-old brother Jon. The six of us squeezed into spare
beds at my maternal grandmother’s house. It was large, with six bedrooms
and two bathrooms, but she was the caretaker of three elderly people, so
most of the rooms were already spoken for. It was hardly ideal sharing a
bedroom with my sister, grandmother and parents, but at least I didn’t feel
like an outsider. My mother told us Burgard Place was a “nice”
neighbourhood when she was growing up, which meant it was mostly
white. By the time my family and I moved in, it was mostly low-income
Black families that lived there, the vibrant sixties paint having faded to light
yellows and dull greens. I had no problem making friends with the
neighbourhood kids. They didn’t judge me for being poor or having parents
that yelled at each other constantly; they were in the same position. We
bonded over our love of Jonathan Taylor Thomas and TLC, shared our
sorrow over the spells in The Craft being too demanding to actually
perform (who has access to all those animals and candles?) and Tupac’s
untimely death.
By that point we’d had unnoticed and untreated head lice for months. We
were positively crawling with them. The only way my parents figured it out
was through my grandmother, who noticed one of the women she cared for
scratching incessantly. Hundreds of dollars of Nix bottles were placed on
the counter. Everyone’s hair was treated, everyone’s sheets were washed. I
remember my grandmother’s face as she applied the prescription shampoo
to my head: her lips tight, downturned, the perfect blend of annoyance and
disgust. I’d seen her look at other people with that face—the people she
cared for, my parents, the parish priest on occasion. She’d never looked at
me like that, though. Not before that night.
Then my uncle Jerry came crashing into the picture. Uncle Jerry was a
heroin addict. With gaunt cheeks and a big, bushy beard, he resembled
Jesus on the shroud of Turin, only Uncle Jerry wore a David Foster
Wallace–style bandana and the same plaid button-up shirt every day. He
was homeless, too, so my grandmother gathered him in and gave him the
basement—the same place my family was temporarily storing nearly all of
our things. Within weeks, my dad’s expensive stereo system went missing.
He blamed my uncle, saying he’d sold it for drug money. My grandma
offered no evidence to counter this, no apology or shame on her son’s
behalf. She simply told my dad to drop it. My dad was working at Sun
Television and Appliances at the time and had won that stereo system in a
sales competition. It was a trophy for him, recognition, a small sign that
he’d accomplished something when his current circumstances were telling
him the exact opposite. He wasn’t going to drop anything. He was going to
stew, collect grievances and spit them in Mom’s ear, poisoning her against
her own family. Then he was going to wait for the inevitable.
Like any good Catholic woman, my mother modelled herself after the
Virgin Mary. She prayed the rosary every day, regularly visited the
Dominican nunnery, made us watch the Catholic channel EWTN for hours
in what felt like Clockwork Orange–style sessions. Her religious devotion
was inconvenient when I wanted to watch cartoons, but I still admired it,
viewing her with a reverence bordering on holiness. She’d regularly tell me
about her labour with me: how she was hooked up to a myriad of IVs and
monitoring devices for eighteen hours before I was finally born. She was so
dedicated to being my mother she nearly died. I’m sure she didn’t mean for
this story to chronicle, even mythologize, her love for me, but it did. As far
as I was concerned, the Virgin Mary had nothing on her.
This is what made her sudden transition so jarring. Once Uncle Jerry
started causing problems, my mom would snap at me for small things. Her
eyes would focus, unblinking, her face would harden, her lips so chapped
they resembled desert mud cracks. I didn’t notice the change in her at first
because, at that point, all the adults in my life were constantly angry. I never
knew what would set them off. It was like I was walking a perpetual
tightrope. Sooner or later I’d have to fall.
It finally erupted one day in September. My uncle was carrying around a
white bucket of hot tar, stirring it with a smooth piece of wood. He planned
to use it on my grandmother’s driveway. At the same time he was arguing
with my mother. His eyes were wide and blue, angry like my mom’s. Then
he tried to fling hot tar at her. His aim was off; instead of my mother, it hit
my two-year-old brother Jon in the face. There was screaming and crying
and more chaos than I’d ever witnessed. The scariest part was no one was
taking control of the situation. Things didn’t stop when my brother was
hurt; they intensified. My mother cradled Jon with one hand while she
tensed the other, darting a steely finger into my uncle’s chest, accusing. My
uncle stood before her, aflame with anger.
No one was acting like an adult. Or rather, they weren’t acting like the
responsible adults I saw calmly reasoning their way through family
squabbles on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. They weren’t sturdy and
dependable like Uncle Phil and Aunt Viv; they were much worse—
emotional, fallible, human. My father wasn’t there. My grandmother wasn’t
there. My older sister wasn’t there. At eight years old, I found myself the
only person in the house who wanted to act responsibly, so I did the one
thing eight-year-olds are told to do when things get bad: I dialed 911.
Turns out that was a bad idea. My parents were angry at me for bringing
the police into matters. My grandmother was livid. That all seemed
backwards to me. I thought the big deal was my brother being burned,
unintentionally or not. Instead I was being lectured on “family business
staying private.” I don’t know if my grandmother knew that my uncle had
burned my brother. There’s a scar on Jon’s face to this day so she wouldn’t
have had to look hard for evidence. I do know she told my parents we had
to get out of her house immediately—and we had to leave Teena with her. I
couldn’t understand why Teena was the chosen one. I wondered if it was
because she had blonde hair and blue eyes. She was completely white, not
just half, like me. We packed what we could and, minus Teena, settled into
a room at the closest Salvation Army, homeless again.
Without my grandmother’s financial aid, payments towards my private
schooling fell behind. I was still driven to school every day, still allowed to
sit in my normal seat in class, but even that started to feel precarious, as if
the Jenga tower of our lives was one sharp tug from tumbling.
Then it did.
One evening my mom came to pick up Missy and me from the after-
school program. As soon as she stepped in the room, words were pouring
from her mouth—a swirling, manic saga mixing our real-life family drama
with sections of the Bible and The Catholic Catechism, complete with
references to demons and witchcraft. She wasn’t speaking to anyone in
particular. Her story required no audience. It was as if her words were
summoning her into existence, making her real, and if she paused for even
the space of a breath she’d disappear. The rants were a lifeline, a plea. Help.
Someone help.
The teachers reacted with judgment and disgust. They asked if she, a
sober woman with an addict for a brother, was on drugs. When this made
her even more upset, they asked her to leave. She was scaring the other
kids.
After that Child and Family Services began circling our fragmented
family. In hindsight, I’m surprised we managed to avoid their attention for
as long as we did. My father tried to contain things. He quickly had my
mother hospitalized while we were at school one day, then warned me a
social worker was coming to talk to me. He said it was very important that I
make her think everything was fine, that I was happy. If I didn’t, she could
decide to take us away and break our family even more. I don’t remember
what I said to the social worker but it must have been good enough. We
weren’t dragged away screaming. We were still at the Salvation Army with
my dad, waiting, surviving.
Almost as soon as my mom was released from the hospital, my father
declared we were moving to Ohio. My mom had family in Euclid we’d met
exactly once. Her father had gone to art school in Cleveland. Apart from
that, Ohio meant nothing to any of us. I’m not sure what my dad thought he
was running to. I don’t think he did, either. All that mattered was that he
was running. Before he met my mom he’d spent his entire life running—
from jobs, relationships, from his traditional territory. Any time he took a
step forward, one foot was always stubborn and still, waiting for him to turn
and bolt. To him, running was easy. Running was safe. And the possibility
of reinvention, of abandoning whatever mess he’d made and starting fresh,
was always too tempting to resist.
When you have a wife and kids, though, it’s much harder to do that. We
holed up in a motel room while my father looked for a job and a place for
us to live. After a year of bouncing between empty, echoing rental houses
and motel rooms, we settled in Mentor, Ohio. My dad took up selling
satellite services door to door. My mom’s time was split between home and
various mental health units, a grim carousel that never stopped.
What also didn’t stop was my father’s libido. Once again Mom got
pregnant, which would bring our family’s head count back to six. As angry
as my parents were with my grandma, especially after she fought for, and
won, full custody of Teena, they still needed the money she was willing to
provide. Battle-axes were dropped and a tentative normalcy resumed. My
parents even let Grandma take all of us kids for the summer so Mom would
be able to care for the new baby, Mikey, in relative peace. Grandma and
Teena spoiled us with gifts, trips to restaurants and amusement parks,
luxuries our parents could rarely provide at home. We were all happy that
things were finally okay—until Teena saw a louse scurrying through my
hair while we were at church. She dragged us home and treated our hair,
black garbage bags tied over her hands like absurd inflatable mittens. When
my grandma came home and heard how we’d spent our afternoon, she
decided we couldn’t come to her house again unless we were lice-free. She
was the one stable adult in my life, and she had cast me out. I was
devastated. It felt like she was punishing us for something we couldn’t
control.
I’d never trust her again.
Every time Mom came home an hourglass was turned, and we had only so
much time before she was back in the mental health ward again. My dad
was very careful about it, only ever having her hospitalized while we were
at school. We’d come home and he’d be there instead of her, explaining to
us what we’d already guessed.
One day Missy, Jon and I got off the bus to find Mom had set up my
brother Mikey in his high chair on the front lawn. She was pacing and
yelling about God and my father and the Devil, her face red, her eyes wide
with rage. We hoped none of the kids on the bus could see her acting weird,
but apart from that we weren’t really worried. This sometimes happened to
Mom. Which is probably why we were all so surprised when a police
officer knocked on our door. A neighbour had called the cops. Mom pooled
her considerable intellectual resources to convince the officer he was
wasting his time. She was feeding her child on the lawn because it was a
nice day. Was there some law against that? Her logic was surprisingly
sturdy, even in the throes of illness. At that point, her diagnosis had gone
from schizophrenia to postpartum depression to manic depression. Some
people, like my grandmother and Teena, were convinced there was nothing
wrong with her at all. It really depended on who she was speaking with and
how “on” she was.
Still, she couldn’t fool my dad. She didn’t even try. As soon as he got
home from hours of white suburban doors slamming in his wide Mohawk
face, she’d start in, recounting their unsavoury history in grotesque detail,
making horrific accusations, her face inches from his as she trailed him
from room to room. It was as if she needed to make him pay for her pain.
Dad usually started off quiet, but eventually he erupted, too, calling her
crazy, threatening that no judge would ever give her custody of us. Neither
of them seemed to care that we could hear every word. Out of politeness we
tried to pretend we were in a parallel dimension, just watching Nickelodeon
on the couch while the next universe over they screamed and cried.
The last grain of sand in her hourglass fell again. She was gone by the
time we came home the next day.
After three years I’d forgotten what it was like to not itch my head every
five minutes. Through experience I had taught myself covert ways to
scratch the lice so as not to bring attention to them. I scratched while
flipping my hair, or running my fingers through it, or while leaning my
head on my hand in a perfect imitation of preteen boredom. I even trained
myself to keep from scratching as long as possible, hoping my steely
determination would force the tiny bugs to wave a white flag and leave my
scalp, defeated.
Despite my attempts to appear lice-free, the staff at Dale R. Rice
Elementary would not be fooled. They had random head lice checks. One
thing I’ll say about this particular upper-middle-class school is that they had
considerable tact. I wasn’t singled out when the nurse found a small country
of bugs in my hair. They called me down to the office over the intercom
once everyone was back in class, claiming I had “an appointment,”
mercifully omitting that appointment was with a bottle of medicated
shampoo and a fine-tooth comb.
With my mother in the hospital, my dad had to deal with this round
alone. He opted to totally shave off Jon’s hair. Jon wasn’t impressed. In his
grade one school photo he looks like he missed Christmas. Dad treated my
sister and me, but given his track record we had very little faith in his
abilities. Being independent young women of nine and eleven, we decided
to deal with it ourselves. Every night we’d close the door to our bedroom,
turn on the TV and start picking nits out of each other’s hair. To us, this
seemed like a foolproof plan. We would not only be allowed back at
Grandma’s house, we’d also help out our hapless parents.
Eventually I figured out there was a fundamental flaw in our plan: we
pulled the nits from one another’s hair and deposited them directly onto our
carpeted floor, where they’d hatch and climb onto our beds, couches and
clothes. So our objective changed. Instead of getting rid of the lice—which
was clearly impossible—we would focus on getting rid of the really
obvious bright white nits, hoping the hard-to-spot dark brown ones we left
behind would go undetected by the head lice squad at school. It wasn’t the
worst plan. After all, that was the way every type of social service seemed
to approach our unsavoury realities: don’t solve the problems of poverty or
racism or violence or mental illness. Just hide them away.
It actually worked for a while. No one could tell there was an entire
ecosystem on our heads, and since no one could tell, no one cared. This was
helped along immensely by my entry into junior high the next year. The
school was so big no one dared recommend a school-wide lice check. Olly
olly oxen free.
Child and Family Services continued to pop in regularly. My father prepped
us like key witnesses in a murder trial: readymade answers to probable
questions, a list of dos and don’ts. Do mention everything is fine. Don’t
mention Mom and Dad’s raging fights or the head lice.
We didn’t have any problem shaking them off. The stakes were too high.
We knew none of those social workers were interested in repairing our
broken family. They were waiting for the right time to take a sledgehammer
to it, scatter the shards and call it a job well done. Regardless of our
parents’ feelings for one another, which were becoming more and more
toxic, I knew that none of us kids were in their crosshairs, at least not
overtly. Instead of targeting us for violence, our parents would turn our
sympathy into weapons to use against each other. If we witnessed anything,
either physical or verbal, we would immediately come to the defence of the
person being attacked. Mom didn’t utilize this as dramatically as Dad did—
he would make a show of the slightest shove—but Mom still had much
more historical material to draw from, considering how long and how badly
Dad had abused her. The constant manipulation was like getting hit with
shrapnel: painful enough, but nowhere near as bad as direct hits. As the
oldest child, I took on the responsibility of refereeing their fights, sending
the youngest siblings into another room to watch TV while I picked a side
and screamed my allegiance. I could handle them, I told myself. My
siblings were safe as long as I was around. I needed to be able to see them,
to protect them from the stress of managing two warring adults. I couldn’t
do that in a foster home.
Against all odds, my parents had another son, Dakota. Now there were
seven of us squeezing into a three-bedroom house. The space was too tight,
the neighbours were too close. The police continued to be called on us
whenever my mom was ill, my mother continued her biannual residency at
the hospital. My father was looking for an out, I could feel it. We all were.
As if on cue, my dad’s stepfather died back in Canada. While my
grandparents’ beautiful house was left to my aunt, a considerable patch of
land behind it was Dad’s for the taking. Within a week of hearing the news,
Dad was done with Mentor, done with Ohio, done with the United States of
America. He was heading out to find gold and glory on a new frontier: the
Six Nations reserve.
Right before we moved, Missy and I borrowed a Ouija board from one of
my friends. We knew our mother wouldn’t approve, so we used it out in the
woods behind our house. We asked the usual teenage girl questions about
boys and boobs. Then my sister asked one I wasn’t expecting: “How old
will I be when we get rid of the lice?” The planchette sat unmoving for a
moment, then gradually moved to the numbers 1 and 6. Five years away.
That meant I’d be eighteen.
I remembered my grandparents’ house on Six Nations as the pinnacle of
luxury and beauty. Cupboards stocked with cookies and unopened products
from the Home Shopping Network. Hundreds of channels playing on tons
of TVs. Dolls dressed up like Indian girls I’d never resemble. And
surrounding everything, most magical of all, planters. Hanging white
planters and large plastic planters and small terracotta planters spilling out
snapdragons and pansies and tulips.
We, on the other hand, moved into a two-bedroom trailer with fake wood
panelling and no running water. Our electricity came from an exceedingly
complicated network of extension cords, strung up and spliced to shit by my
father. Our heat came from a tiny wood-burning stove in the living room.
For the first few months we paid for a port-a-potty to be set up next to the
trailer. Eventually that became too expensive, so we used a commode that
we dumped in the woods whenever the bucket got too full. To wash meant
pouring water from a giant blue jug into a pot, heating it on the stove, then
sponging ourselves off in the otherwise useless bathroom. Washing our hair
was the same, though we did that over the kitchen sink once we removed all
the dishes, still sticky with ketchup and leftover Kraft Dinner.
Dad told us that he’d have running water and full electricity within a
year.
Missy and I had stopped nit-picking one another, but any time one of my
younger brothers had the misfortune of laying his head on my lap, my
fingers would instinctively start sifting through his hair. It was easy enough
to find the white nits in nearly black strands, but I prided myself on being
able to find the incognito eggs so many school nurses had overlooked. I’d
also started compulsively nit-picking myself. I’d slide my hand through my
hair until I felt them like tiny poppy seeds scattered at my scalp, grasp them
between two fingers, then dig the nail of my index finger into the flesh of
my thumb and pull to the ends of my hair. I’d do it for hours, unthinking,
until there were indentations in my thumbs. I didn’t bother to hide what I
was doing. I knew I was crossing some invisible, unspoken line; like my
mother’s mental illness, we did not speak of the lice unless we absolutely
had to. Still, I was desperate for normalcy. This seemed like the only thing I
could control, the only thing I had any chance to change. I had to get rid of
the lice.
Yet despite my best intentions, I couldn’t change the facts. To really treat
lice, you need to treat everyone at the same time, wash any clothes that may
have been contaminated, wash any sheets that have been contaminated,
vacuum floors and couches and mattresses, then do it all again in seven to
ten days to prevent reinfestation. We were five kids and two adults with
barely enough money to pay for our normal loads at the laundromat. Plus,
even after a year, even after two years, even after five years, we still had no
running water. Those were the facts. What’s more, we were tired. My dad
still treated us with Nix and spent hours combing our hair with a fine-tooth
comb whenever any of us were sent home from school, but I could see he’d
given up. Lice were inescapable, part of the package.
My mother’s mental illness kept coming back like a nightmarish refrain.
She’d be gone once, twice, three times a year, leaving me to mother my
siblings, make some dinners, wash some clothes. Though our neighbours
were now too far away to either hear my parents screaming or see Mom
doing anything they might deem worth a 911 call, that didn’t keep the social
workers at bay. Two of my siblings went to one school, and two went to
another, a Mohawk immersion school. There were frequent head lice checks
at both. My youngest brothers got sent home every single time. Eventually
their school notified the Children’s Aid Society. As soon as we found out
we scrubbed everything. The trailer was never as clean as it was before
social workers were scheduled to show. Like a stage director, Dad would
block the scene. He made sure the living room and kitchen looked nice, that
we were all sitting obediently on the couch, that we had our scripts
memorized, then gently encouraged the social worker to interview each of
us outside. That way she couldn’t see how cramped the two bedrooms were
or witness the horror that was our bathroom. It worked. It always did.
It used to strike me as strange the way social workers and police officers
flocked to our family. My siblings and I were great students. We had no
problems at school; no mysterious bruises discoloured our skin. We were
liked by our teachers, made friends easily. Any time any of us played
sports, our dad was in the stands and in the coach’s ear, politicking our way
to better positions. Our mom knew the names of all of our friends, even
though we were too embarrassed to invite them to meet her. We never went
hungry. We never lacked for love or encouragement. Our parents were far
from perfect, but their main barriers to being better parents were poverty,
intergenerational trauma and mental illness—things neither social workers
nor police officers have ever been equipped to address, yet are both
allowed, even encouraged, to patrol.
Of course I know now it’s not strange at all that our family was
monitored by child services. Indigenous kids in Canada are anywhere from
five to twelve times more likely to be taken into government care than non-
Indigenous kids, depending on province. The main reason cited is neglect.
Nico Trocmé, who is the director of McGill University’s School of Social
Work, as well as principal researcher for the Canadian Incidence Study of
Reported Child Abuse and Neglect, says that in these cases, “neglect” is
another word for poverty. In an interview with The Tyee, he says, “I’ve
certainly never seen any evidence from any of the research to indicate that
there is something endemic to First Nations families that would explain a
higher rate of placement. It has much more to do with the high rates of
poverty and the difficult social and economic circumstances they’re living
in.” In other words, social services conflates not being able to afford
adequate housing, food, clothing and health care with choosing not to have
adequate housing, food, clothing and health care. Instead of supporting poor
families and helping them become financially secure, social services’
approach is to simply take the kids. It’s as though they believe that
removing the added expenses of children is doing poor parents a favour, or
taking kids from loving parents and throwing them in impersonal,
sometimes dangerous foster homes is doing them a favour. As anyone who
has had experience with child welfare might anticipate, the effects of this
policy are disastrous. A 2015 national study found that 60 percent of
homeless youth were once involved with child welfare. A 2009 study found
that over a third of youth in British Columbia’s care were also involved in
the youth justice system; in fact, they were more likely to be involved with
the law than to finish high school.
It would seem, then, that Indigenous children have more reason to fear
governmental care than they do their parents’ poverty. In some sense I
intuited this, even as a kid. I knew it was bullshit that social workers and
cops had so much control over our family, that they could split us up the
moment we didn’t cater to their sensibilities. Knowing this then made me
hate social workers and cops. Knowing this now makes me hate the systems
that empower them—systems that put families in impossible situations,
then punish them for not being able to claw their way out.
Though we never met her strict no-lice requirement, my grandmother
eventually lifted my family’s banishment from her house. Still, ever since
that first expulsion, I had a strong fear of spreading my lice to others. If I
ever slept anywhere that wasn’t my house, I insisted on wearing a
sweatshirt to bed, pulling the hood up over my ponytail before I laid my
head down. It wasn’t a great method of containment. At seventeen I spread
lice to my high school boyfriend. He was sure he’d caught them from
sleeping outside on a camping trip, but when he jokingly suggested that he
probably caught them from me, I felt sick. I knew he did. He got rid of them
easily enough, but as long as he was with me he would never be safe. His
life would become mine: always scratching, always feeling like a
contaminant.
I tried to break up with him that day. When he asked why, I couldn’t give
him the real reason, and I couldn’t give a fake one with any amount of
conviction, so I reluctantly gave in and stayed, promising myself I’d be
more vigilant. Promising myself if he caught it one more time, I’d leave.
Within six months I was pregnant.
I finally got rid of my head lice at eighteen. I could only do it by leaving my
parents’ house. Part of me always knew that. With only one head to treat,
access to running water, enough spare cash to pay for two rounds of
medication and all the necessary laundry, delousing myself was
considerably easier than I’d thought it’d be. The lice were no longer
impossible, insurmountable adversaries. Still, it didn’t feel triumphant like
I’d always assumed it would. It felt temporary, like a trick. Any second the
scratching was going to start again, I was sure. I kept trying to pull
imaginary nits from my hair, itching at phantom lice.
I wasn’t just worried about myself, though. I had a child now. As soon as
they were born I decided I didn’t want their childhood to involve endless
scratching. I didn’t want their childhood to involve any scratching. They
were going to be lice-free forever. I would succeed where my parents failed.
My kid is twelve now. Though they’ve caught head lice at least four
times during their young, everybody-throw-your-coats-into-a-pile stage, no
social worker has ever come knocking. Perhaps our skin isn’t dark enough
for that sort of check-in.
Naturally, every time my kid has had lice, I’ve caught them, too. That
Ouija board was full of shit.
34 GRAMS PER DOSE
he cookies don’t taste how I remember them. They’re Chips Ahoy!
They’re triple chocolate. 170 calories per 34 grams. It usually takes at
least 102 grams for me to feel like I’ve reached what I should probably call
“proper dosage,” considering how and why I consume them. I’ve already
swallowed 510 calories by the time I realize these cookies aren’t the
medicine I’d hoped they’d be.
For years I’ve believed food would make me happy. I believed it when
my mother let me take a few sloppy bites of a secret Buster Bar from Dairy
Queen. I believed it when I worked at a gas station convenience store,
relying on chips and chocolate to fuel my eight-hour shifts. I believe it even
now that my clothes from one year ago have started constricting me,
leaving pink, tender welts across my stomach, my back. I’ll probably
believe it again as soon as the thought of these six unfulfilling cookies
slides from my short-term memory.
I am twenty-five and walking down Bloor Street West, past expensive
boutiques and luxury-brand storefronts I never expect to enter. One of my
close friends is walking with me, telling me about a wedding she’s just
attended. She hovers over details of the catering, describing dishes that
sound foreign to me. I shrug, say I’ve never tried them but if she says
they’re good, I trust her.
“You’ve never had foie gras?” she asks in disbelief.
“No. I grew up poor.”
“So did I.”
She has told me about her childhood poverty before. She has a very
specific memory of her family combing the beach for beer bottles to take
back to the liquor store so they’d have money for food. But to look at her
now you’d never guess. Her skin is flawless and pale as a Southern belle’s.
Her hair is perfect. I’ve never noticed so much as a split end. It’s always
brushed to brilliance, or tied back simply and elegantly, or sometimes
woven around her head in an intricate up-do. Her clothes are perfect.
They’re never stained, never torn, never hemmed sloppily. If she’s wearing
something that looks like silk, don’t bother asking. It’s definitely real silk.
Her vocabulary, her manner of speaking, her delivery of smart jokes as
coolly and effortlessly as a ’40s femme fatale, all of it sounds and looks like
money.
And then there’s her extensive knowledge of culinary delicacies like foie
gras. Times like this I remember poverty was an unsavoury pit stop in her
life, not the final destination.
For the most part I don’t feel ashamed of my poor upbringing. Of course,
it’s easier to detach that shame now that I’m safely outside of it. What do I
have to be ashamed of now? I have running water and the ability to buy fast
food whenever I want.
But when she asks me if I’ve ever had foie gras, her voice first so
incredulous, then so dismissive, that small ember of shame that has been
quietly smouldering all these years catches flame once more. I become
intensely aware of my clothes, which I can only afford to buy second-hand,
and which fit strangely, the way designers seem to think all plus-sized
clothing should. I become aware of my shoes, which are dirty and torn. I
become aware of my hair, a mass of frizzy, unruly chaos I’ve inherited from
my mother. I, who survived on peanut butter and food-bank cereal during
my formative years, who never had the good sense to develop a more
expensive palate once I left home, have no business in this neighbourhood,
casually perusing the windows of Dolce & Gabbana and Louis Vuitton.
Foie gras is more than just two French words I can barely pronounce, more
than just a meal certain people sometimes enjoy. It is a test that separates
the high from the low, the rich from the poor, the worldly from the ignorant.
The white from everyone else.
Foie gras is a test, and I have failed. Again.
When I lived on the Six Nations rez as a teen, food options were limited.
There was a Zehrs grocery store in Caledonia, about seventeen kilometres
away in one direction, and a few grocery stores in Brantford, about twenty
kilometres away in the other. On the rez itself, we had a couple of
restaurants. My favourites were Village Pizza, which is basically a culinary
landmark on Six, and Village Café, which still serves up the best breakfast
around.
But you can’t subsist solely on delivery pizza and restaurant breakfast. Or
at least, you shouldn’t. That left gas station convenience stores to fill the
culinary gap. Like any convenience store, they carried everyday staples like
milk, eggs and bread, but other than that their aisles were filled with junk
food and canned goods. If you were lucky, one of the gas stations might
have some bananas or apples for sale, but most didn’t, and nearly
everything was priced higher than what you’d find at a grocery store in the
city. So not only was it harder to eat healthy on the rez; it also cost more to
eat unhealthy.
Our family’s diet consisted mainly of low-grade ground beef and cheap
pasta. Spaghetti and meatballs, Hamburger Helper, hamburgers, goulash—
which, along with stuffed cabbage, was the only reminder we had of my
mother’s Hungarian heritage. We’d often have pancakes for supper, or, if
Mom either wasn’t feeling up to cooking or was in the hospital, bowls of
corn flakes from the food bank, piled so high with sugar that by the time we
reached the bottom of the bowl the milk and sugar had formed a thick
slurry.
My siblings and I self-medicated with sugar and junk food the way some
self-medicate with alcohol and drugs. We might not have been able to help
our mother deal with her bipolar disorder; we might not have been able to
help our father shoulder the financial burden of caring for five children; we
might not have had running water or a house that we’d be comfortable
bringing friends to, but we did have sugar, the one luxury we could afford
to indulge, the only path to normal that we could see open, inviting us in.
Other kids—richer kids, off-rez kids, happy kids—had Snickers bars and
Doritos and Oreos, and so, sometimes, did we.
The documentary Food, Inc. dives into the messy, unethical world of food
production in America. A segment titled “The Dollar Menu” profiles the
Gonzalez family. They’re hard-working, with both parents putting in long
hours at unforgiving jobs to support their two children. Neither parent has
enough time to really cook. The segment opens with Mr. Gonzalez ordering
food for dinner from Burger King. He buys five Rodeo Cheeseburgers, two
chicken sandwiches, two small Sprites and one large Dr Pepper.
The total for all that food, with tax, is $11.48, or a meagre $2.87 per
person. As Mr. Gonzalez passes everything out and the family starts to eat,
Mrs. Gonzalez’s voice narrates: “We didn’t even think about healthy eating
because we used to think everything was healthy. Now that I know that the
food is really unhealthy for us, I feel guilty giving it to my kids.”
The movie cuts to the Gonzalez family grocery shopping. The younger
daughter wants a pear. They’re on sale for 99 cents per pound.
“First check to see how many are there for a pound,” her mother says
before walking off to join her husband.
The older sister grabs one and puts it on the scale. Her face is impassive,
the way your face gets when you’re used to poverty’s heartbreak. The way
it gets when you spend your life watching, helpless, as your parents struggle
against an unrelenting tide, knowing the day will come when you must
navigate that stormy sea yourself.
“Not worth it, honey,” she says to her younger sister. “You can only get,
like, two or three.”
She places a hand on the back of her sister’s head and leads her away.
The little girl may not understand now, but one day she’ll learn, the way all
poor kids must. Poor people can’t afford good health. Poor people can’t
even afford five-cent plastic bags. My family certainly couldn’t. Dad
always sent us searching for empty cardboard boxes we could use instead.
We’d scour the shelves for any box we could empty quickly. We’d dig
through bins full of cardboard that management kept at the front of the
cheapest grocery stores, knowing families like ours wouldn’t waste money
on plastic bags. We couldn’t even if we wanted to. Every nickel counts
when you’re poor.
When I was a kid I thought grocery shopping was exciting. There were
so many colourful boxes calling out to me, so many empty calories
jockeying for their chance to be ground between my increasingly porous,
cavity-riddled teeth. By the time I was eight I knew better than to ask my
parents to buy me anything, but my little brother Jon was only four, so he
still had hope. He would grab the brightest box with the most sugar inside,
sheepishly show it to our mother, then when she shook her head and told
him to put it back, say, “That’s okay. Maybe next time,” not daring, even at
four years old, to let his disappointment weigh on her. Somehow, he’d
already learned what poverty meant, how it shaped your needs, your
desires, your expectations. All before he’d entered kindergarten.
The reason junk food is so much cheaper than nutritious food is the U.S.
government. This is not a conspiracy theory; it’s a fact. The U.S.
government subsidizes what are called “cash crops”: wheat, corn and
soybeans. They push farmers to overproduce these crops, which farmers
then sell at a deep discount to companies that turn them into high-fructose
corn syrup, hydrolyzed soy protein, refined carbohydrates—all the primary
ingredients in food poor families rely upon, both in Canada and in the U.S.
Since empty calories are both cheap and widely available, it should be no
surprise that the biggest indicator of obesity is a person’s income level. And
since so many Western countries are built on white supremacy, it should
also come as no surprise that the biggest indicator of poverty is race. In
Canada, a staggering one in five racialized families live in poverty, as
opposed to one in twenty white families. This puts many poor, racialized
families in the position where they have no choice but to rely on cheap,
unhealthy food and, as a result, support the same companies that have
converted their poverty into corporate profit in the first place.
By encouraging farmers to overproduce cash crops, the U.S. government
has ultimately helped corporations create a food economy where poor,
racialized communities depend upon unhealthy food to survive. And
because poor diet has been linked to health problems such as type 2
diabetes, heart problems, cancer and stroke, this would also mean that the
U.S. government has been essentially paying for poor, racialized people to
become sick through its crop subsidy program. In some ways this is to be
expected. Capitalism always prioritizes profit over people. But it raises the
question: if these crop subsidies dispr oport ionat ely affected white people’s
health and well-being the way they dispr oport ionat ely impact racialized
people’s health and well-being, would they still be in place?
Consider Sherronda J. Brown’s “narrative of pain.” In her essay
“Decolonizing Empathy: Why Our Pain Will Never Be Enough to Disarm
White Supremacy,” Brown describes a nursing book that was recalled for
its descriptions of how racialized people—including “Arabs/Muslims,”
“Asians,” “Blacks,” “Jews,” “Hispanics” and “Native Americans”—
supposedly responded to pain. According to this book, as a Native
American I can endure a very high level of pain before requesting pain
meds. My husband, who has seen me pop Tylenol at even the slightest sign
of a headache, would be very surprised to hear this.
The glaring omission from this list is the white race. One can assume
why. For white people, other white people are considered “normal,” and
therefore unremarkable, meaning their pain is also “normal” and therefore
unremarkable. This is how you can tell white supremacy is functioning the
way it’s supposed to: because white people are the standard by which all
others are measured. If white people are the ones who are “normal,” that
means racialized people are by default “abnormal.” Further, Brown argues
that if white people believe Black, Indigenous and people of colour “don’t
feel pain in the same way that they do,” then white people also “don’t see us
as being human in the same way that they are.”
This bias is very convenient for countries like Canada and the U.S.,
which still have mostly white populations. If racialized people aren’t
considered human, it’s okay for them to have unhealthy bodies. It’s okay if
they have unhealthy minds. It’s okay if the state submits them to violence
and trauma again and again and again, withholding justice and relief. All
the pain white governments have historically caused racialized people can
be justified; all the pain they’re causing racialized people today can be
justified; all the pain they will ever cause racialized people can forever be
justified. After all, racialized people can’t really feel pain the same way
white folks can anyway.
Though American health studies have often neglected to obtain statistical
facts on Indigenous people, the Canadian government has not. In fact,
they’ve gathered information specifically about Indigenous peoples and
health. In 1973, the Department of National Health and Welfare released
Nutrition Canada, which was the result of nearly ten years of surveys on
the food and nutrition of Canadians. As Krista Walters points out in her
paper, “ ‘A National Priority’: Nutrition Canada’s Survey and the
Disciplining of Aboriginal Bodies, 1964–1975,” the nutrition analysts in
this survey decided to group both white settlers and immigrants into a giant
group they called the “national population.” Two groups were excluded
from this category: “Indians” and “Eskimos.”
“The construction of these groupings underscores the special otherness of
Aboriginal bodies,” Walters writes, “and the form of data collection and
conclusions drawn well illustrate that this government funded project aimed
not simply to raise the standard of health in Canada but was part of the
state’s ongoing agenda to assimilate Aboriginal peoples.”
How is gathering information specifically about Aboriginal peoples’
health related to assimilation? It seems like a harmless enough venture,
perhaps even beneficial considering how often statistics on Indigenous
populations are conveniently ignored. However, as Walters points out, the
study doesn’t distinguish any other cultural, religious, class or ethnic
groups. Everyone other than “Indians” and “Eskimos” is lumped together as
“nondescript Canadian citizenry, distinguished in the published reports only
by region, age, and gender.”
If the government wanted stats on Indigenous peoples’ health so they
could measure the effects of colonialism, intending to develop methods to
counter and correct those effects, the decision to segregate Indigenous
peoples from the “national population” would be completely justified. But
the survey itself did not consider the effects reserves, the Indian Act and
residential schools have had on traditional diets and food knowledge. Nor
did it consider the limited access to fresh food on reserves, or the higher
costs of food on reserves compared with in urban centres.
Instead, accessible Indigenous foods like wild game, tubers, berries, wild
rice and fish were considered “country food” and treated as “limited and
supplementary.” Certain methods of preparing food were called “primitive,”
a word that has been very effectively used throughout history to
delegitimize Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and culture. Essentially,
Walters writes, if any person practised food preparation or relied on
nutrition that deviated from the norms of settler Canadians, they were
“pathologized as practising poor nutrition.”
We must consider this in context. By the 1960s, people within the
Canadian government were well aware of their policies of starvation used to
clear the plains. They were aware of the way residential schools starved and
malnourished Indigenous children in their care. They were aware of policies
they had written and enforced that prohibited Indigenous people from
participating in traditional hunting and fishing on their own territory. They
also knew that they had forced many Indigenous communities to relocate to
completely different lands, making it sometimes impossible to rely on food
sources that may have been abundant before, but were scarce in their new
homes.
These are only a handful of government policies that have targeted
Indigenous bodies, all of which have had devastating effects on our health.
By ignoring these policies but emphasizing their effects, the Canadian
government’s survey makes Indigenous people seem inherently unhealthy.
And if we as Indigenous people are inherently unhealthy, well then, we’re
going to need Canada’s help to become healthy again, aren’t we? We might
have to come live in cities, where there’s more access to fresh fruits and
vegetables. We might have to give up our lands and treaty rights. We might
have to watch as inherently healthy Canadians move onto our homelands
and build houses and grocery stores and set up farmers’ markets and
community gardens. We might have to pretend the very colonialism that has
cursed us will suddenly, inexplicably, save us.
It’s all in our best interest, really.
Whenever I looked at the food pyramid in school I was both confused and
amazed. How could anyone eat three to five servings of vegetables in a
day? Each member of my family only ever had one heaping spoonful of
canned vegetables per day. Soft and salty string beans or mushy boiled
carrots or peas like deflating balloons.
There’s a certain shame in learning about the food pyramid when you’re
poor. Just like Canada’s nutrition survey in the 1960s, teachers who preach
the gospel of the food pyramid assume that if you’re eating unhealthily, you
have a choice. That if you’re eating unhealthily, it’s entirely your fault. I felt
this shame acutely when I was in high school. We had to track our food for
a few days in health class to measure our diet against what we were
supposed to be eating according to the food pyramid. My diet, like the diets
of so many poor and racialized families, consisted mostly of carbs, dairy
and fat. There was very little protein, fibre, fruits or vegetables. As I filled
out the worksheets, I knew that I was failing, that my family was failing. I
lied to make myself seem healthier, adding tallies of fresh fruit and protein
where really there was none. None of the worksheets mentioned that
healthy food was more expensive, or that food banks mostly relied on
giving out non-perishables to families like mine, families that visited at
least one food bank every month, our hands outstretched, hoping for boxes
of cereal and day-old doughnuts. In the photocopied utopia of these
worksheets, there was no poverty. There were only these facts:
Fats, Oils and Sweets: use sparingly
Milk, Yogurt and Cheese: 2–3 servings
Meat, Poultry, Fish, Dry Beans, Eggs and Nuts: 2–3 servings
Vegetables: 3–5 servings
Fruits: 2–4 servings
Bread, Cereal, Rice and Pasta: 6–11 servings
I’d stare at the list and try to imagine what it would be like to be that well
fed. For the first year and a half of high school I didn’t eat anything for
lunch. My dad had inquired about enrolling me in a government-subsidized
lunch program, which I’d relied on for hot lunches when we lived in the
States. They didn’t have anything like that in Canada, though. My dad
never told me this with words. I only figured it out when I saw him focus on
my younger brothers, whom he now had to pack lunches for every day—
something he’d never had to do, or budget for, before. He knew the
teachers’ attention would be on my brothers’ lunchboxes, not mine; that if
they weren’t properly filled, social services could bang down our door and
take my brothers away. I knew this was my father’s biggest fear: his
children disappearing into the foster care system. I could see it in his eyes
when he ran to the convenience store first thing in the morning to buy
peanut butter for their lunches, or, when he realized peanut butter was no
longer allowed in schools, small microwavable cans of ravioli.
I was thirteen, though. Practically an adult. I had to fend for myself. A
few times a week my friend Amber took pity on me and would buy me
some twelve-cent Timbits to hold me over, or a thirty-five-cent pizza bun
from Zehrs. My real daily food pyramid—the one I would have filled out if
I hadn’t been too ashamed—remained mostly empty and always unhealthy.
No one seemed to notice or care. It was probably safer that way,
considering what happened to the poor Native kids who were noticed. After
all, according to teachers and social workers, journalists and politicians,
neighbours and total strangers, the parents who could check off the proper
boxes on the food pyramid were the only ones who really deserved children
anyway.
The first time I went to my future husband Mike’s house, in grade eleven, I
took one look at their stocked cupboards, the fruits on their kitchen table,
their two full freezers, and I thought he and his single mother were rich.
Patty was on disability due to her epilepsy and worked part-time caring for
disabled children. The government deducted her income from her monthly
disability cheque, so it didn’t help all that much. In other words, Patty was
definitely not rich. She was just smart enough to stock up on food when it
was on sale.
Patty had picked up this stockpiling technique from her mother, Betty.
Betty often went hungry as a child because her parents thought the men in
the family needed food more than she did. They lived on a farm, and though
her brothers were supposed to be doing chores and manual labour, proving
their masculine worth, Betty was often the one left doing everything, her
stomach concave, empty.
When I found out about this, I couldn’t help but think of my family.
While I know my parents’ focus on my brothers’ lunches wasn’t a
deliberate attempt to starve me, I also know that both Betty’s parents and
my own had a choice to make, and we were the ones who lost. How many
families must make that choice? How many children must lose?
Sometimes I wonder whether Betty binged on food once she started
making her own money, the way I did once I had a job. Whether she, too,
tried to fill her stomach to bursting to make up for all the times it wasn’t full
in her youth.
Maybe it was just me.
It is only recently that Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples has been
referred to as genocide, and even then, it’s usually been “cultural genocide,”
as if that somehow softens its edges and makes it more permissible. More
Canadian.
Brent Bezo, in The Impact of Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma
from the Holodomor Genocide of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, describes how the
Holodomor, a forced starvation that killed millions of Ukrainians,
undermined its victims’ lives:
[Holodomor survivors] reported that the confiscation of food, personal
property and homes rendered them “bare” and resulted in the complete
loss of traditional means to independently support, look after, and
maintain themselves and their families. This loss was reported as a
“destruction” of independent self-sufficiency that was a “deliberate act to
break the will of the Ukrainian people” and “to show people” “that they
would not become independent Ukrainian people.”
When I first read that my breath caught in my throat. Never before had I
seen a non-Indigenous person so succinctly sum up the way that my
people’s experience of genocide worked. First, remove the means for the
people to independently look after and support themselves and their
community. Next, force them to become dependent upon the very state that
wants to destroy them. Withhold basic necessities. Wait.
This is the exact tactic Canada has used on Indigenous peoples for
hundreds of years. So many of our nations have been forcefully displaced,
so many of our children stolen from our arms and placed in residential
schools or, more recently, in the arms of overworked social workers and
violent foster parents, as if white abuse could ever be better than Indigenous
love. These policies are not about what’s best for Indigenous peoples,
despite repeated claims of faux concern from government officials. These
policies are about what’s best for Canada. They are the reason Indigenous
peoples have control over only 0.02 percent of our original lands—a
meagre amount that is still, according to some Canadians, too much.
Canadian success has always depended upon Indigenous destruction.
Just as genocide tends to use the same tactics to carry out its horrors,
genocide also tends to produce similar effects in the lives of survivors. In
Bezo’s study, he discusses the discrepancies between what could be called
Ukraine’s successes and what could be called its failures, years after the
Holodomor. For instance, Ukraine is one of Europe’s fastest-growing
economies and is ranked fourth in the world for its adult literacy rate. Yet,
out of forty-one countries, Ukraine has the highest percentage of eleven-,
thirteen- and fifteen-year-olds who drink alcohol at least once a week. It has
the second-highest number of eleven-year-olds who get drunk at least once
a week, and the most eleven-year-olds who smoke at least once a week. It
holds the unfortunate title of lowest life expectancy in Europe.
How can a country be doing so well economically and educationally and
still be suffering so acutely? Something as traumatic as genocide doesn’t
have a definitive ending point. Its horrors live on in the memories of those
who survive, playing over and over with no reprieve. What are you
supposed to do once you know the depths of human suffering? Once you’ve
experienced the limits of human depravity and indifference? Once you’ve
witnessed how easy it was for people, neighbours even, to see you and your
family as less than human, to treat you as less than human, or to look the
other way and let it happen? How do you take that knowledge and try to
continue on the same way you did before? Everything has a different taste,
a different tone. No amount of economic or educational success can change
that.
And yet some seem to think it can. Here in Canada, Indigenous people
exhibit many of the same behaviours as post-Holodomor Ukrainians, a fact
Bezo acknowledges in his study. We have statistically higher levels of
heavy drinking than non-Indigenous Canadians. We have a five- to ten-year
lower life expectancy, depending on gender. Our rates of daily smoking are
almost double that of non-Indigenous Canadians. The only thing Indigenous
people in Canada and Ukrainians have in common—the only thing that
could account for these eerily similar stats—are our respective experiences
of genocide.
I’ve read so many angry comments degrading Indigenous people because
we haven’t been as economically and educationally successful as Canadians
who haven’t experienced genocide. Or because, according to these people,
Jewish Holocaust survivors have overcome their genocide better than we
have, so we must be inherently deficient. I’ve heard people say Indigenous
people need to “get over” our genocide, as though it’s not still happening
now in newer, more socially acceptable ways. Would making more money
and being more literate make us more deserving of human compassion? It
certainly wouldn’t remove our pain; after all, Ukraine’s economic and
educational successes haven’t made its citizens’ intergenerational trauma
magically disappear.
Epigenetics is the study of how a person’s actions and experiences can
affect their genetic makeup, causing certain genes to become either active
or dormant. It’s a term that was coined by scientists Lars Olov Bygren and
Marcus Pembrey to describe the results they observed in four scientific
studies they conducted, both separately and together, which could not
otherwise be explained by modern genetics. Two of the studies were of
Överkalix, a secluded Swedish community whose seasons of feast or
famine were based almost entirely on the success of their barley and rye
harvests. Bygren and Pembrey found that the granddaughters of women
who were in the womb during famine seasons, and were therefore
undernourished when their eggs were forming, had a significantly increased
risk of early death compared with those whose grandmothers did not
experience famine in utero. This finding supported an earlier study Bygren
did on Överkalix, which found grandsons of men who experienced a feast
season prior to puberty—the time when their sperm were developing—and
therefore overate, were also significantly more likely to die an early death
due to diabetes or heart failure. The scientists found similarly puzzling
results when studying the effects of smoking: the sons of 166 English men
who smoked before puberty were consistently fatter than the sons of men
who either hadn’t smoked at all or had started smoking after puberty.
There was no scientific reason this should be the case—no DNA
sequences had changed—yet it clearly was. The evidence was all there,
suggesting that not only a person’s environment but also their individual
decisions could alter the expression of their genes and thus influence the
lives of their descendants.
Haudenosaunee have always believed in the principle of the seven
generations. When you make a decision, you must consciously think about
what effects that decision could have on your descendants seven
generations in the future. This world does not belong to you; you are merely
borrowing it from the coming faces. Epigenetics seems to replicate that
philosophy on the genetic level. Your decisions and traumas are never
solely yours alone, or even yours and your children’s. Your decisions and
traumas mark every subsequent generation after you, creating ripples in the
future that can’t always be anticipated and can never be controlled.
What does this mean for those who experienced starvation, malnutrition
and other forms of trauma in residential schools? What does this mean for
their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren? Historian of food, health
and colonialism Ian Mosby and assistant professor of anthropology at the
University of Toronto Tracey Galloway have looked at some of these
ramifications in their article “ ‘Hunger Was Never Absent’: How
Residential School Diets Shaped Current Patterns of Diabetes among
Indigenous Peoples in Canada.” The quote in the title comes from
residential school survivor Russell Moses, who used it to describe his years
in Brantford, Ontario’s Mohawk Institute. One can see why he said this—
and also why survivors referred to the school as “the Mush Hole”—when
looking at its menu on any given day:
Breakfast consisted of “two slices of bread with either jam or honey as
the dressing, oatmeal with worms or corn meal porridge, which was
minimal in quantity and appalling in quality.” For lunch, it was “water as
the beverage…one and a half slices of dry bread, and the main course
consisted of a ‘rotten soup’…(i.e., scraps of beef, vegetables, some in a
state of decay).” For supper, “students were given two slices of bread and
jam, fried potatoes, no meat [and] a bun baked by the girls.” Moses even
recalled hungry children “eating from the swill barrel, picking out soggy
bits of food that was intended for the pigs.”
Moses’s experience was hardly the exception. As Mosby and Galloway
note, hunger was so prevalent inside residential schools that, between 1948
and 1952, more than a thousand malnourished students from six residential
schools were used as subjects for nutrition experiments. Instead of being
helped, these children were treated as perfect specimens for scientific
inquiry. Their pain was measured and mapped, theorized about and
eventually immortalized in cold, clinical reports.
I wonder what these scientists told themselves when they conducted their
experiments, how they rationalized their complicity. Whether they thought
about these children while eating their breakfast in the morning, or breaking
from work for lunch. Whether they considered themselves lucky to find so
many starving Indigenous children to experiment on. Whether they were, in
some ways, thankful Canada both mandated and drastically underfunded
residential schools, because it made finding malnourished test subjects that
much easier. Or whether they ignored these types of thoughts altogether,
because coming face to face with what they meant would shatter everything
they believed about their country, about themselves.
The physiological effects of starving affect a person for the rest of their
life. Mosby and Galloway cite studies that show that childhood hunger
often causes stunted height, which in turn can cause an increased tendency
towards obesity as well as higher rates of developing type 2 diabetes.
Metabolic changes occur, as well, which means that even when a child is no
longer starving, hunger has essentially trained the body to continue to
accumulate more fat regardless. Given these sorts of impacts on residential
school survivors, combined with what we are learning about the ways
epigenetics passes these experiences on, how can we possibly expect
survivors’ descendants to be much better off? To “get over” a genocide that
has marked their very genes, and their children’s genes, and their children’s
genes?
My paternal grandmother, Melita Elliott, did not attend the Mush Hole. A
well-off Mohawk family from my community sent their kids to get
educated in the United States, then, when they came back to Six Nations,
they opened schools themselves, offering an alternative to the residential
school. That’s where my grandmother went—to a numbered school. She
was the only child in her family who went. Her siblings weren’t so lucky.
I know very little about my paternal grandfather, Arthur Elliott. But I
know there are Elliotts who did attend the Mush Hole. I saw their names on
a graduation list during a tour. I felt like I was going to vomit.
My father, thankfully, did not attend the Mush Hole. His mother moved
their entire family to Buffalo, New York, to make sure he and his siblings
would be safe. I can’t imagine the fear or resolve it would take to make
such a decision, if one can call it a decision. My grandmother could either
become a refugee on her own people’s lands or watch the Mush Hole
swallow her children one by one.
Mosby and Galloway write, “We can now be fairly certain that the
elevated risk of obesity, early-onset insulin resistance and diabetes observed
among Indigenous peoples in Canada arises, in part at least, from the
prolonged malnutrition experienced by many residential school survivors.”
My father has diabetes. One of his sisters and one of his brothers have
diabetes. Their mother had diabetes. I haven’t developed diabetes yet, but I
often feel it’s only a matter of time before my insulin levels drop and my
diagnosis comes in. It’s my genetic inheritance.
My kid’s, too.
The ways Indigenous peoples deal with our trauma, whether with alcohol or
violence or Chips Ahoy! cookies, get pathologized under colonialism.
Instead of looking at the horrors Canada has inflicted upon us and linking
them to our current health issues, Canada has chosen to blame our biology,
as though those very genes they’re blaming weren’t marked by genocide,
too. This is how a once thriving, healthy population comes to be “inherently
unhealthy.” It wasn’t the genocide that centuries of Canadian officials
enacted upon us that was the problem; it was how we reacted to that
genocide. It was our fault, our bodies’ faults.
Abusers rarely take responsibility for themselves. They prefer to blame
their victims for their actions.
The first time I made Hamburger Helper it was because my mother was in
the hospital. She usually cooked every day, but she was either too depressed
or too manic for Dad to tolerate anymore, so he had her committed. He was
selling satellite dish subscriptions door to door at the time. He came home
tired, too tired to worry about cooking. I was eleven or twelve. Old enough
to figure it out.
No one had taught me to cook, so all I had were the instructions on the
box. I had no idea I was supposed to thaw the ground beef, so I plopped the
frozen chunk in the frying pan and turned on the stove. As soon as the
bottom was done I flipped it over, patiently scraped the cooked portion
away with a wooden spoon, waited for the bottom to cook again, then
repeated the process until everything was brown and broken apart. It took
almost a half-hour.
I added the water, the noodles, the flavoured powder, hoping that dinner
would taste like Mom had made it. She was often an inattentive cook, either
serving crunchy, uncooked noodles or noodles boiled to mush, so the bar
wasn’t exactly high. But Mom’s love and attention were what my siblings
and I hungered for most, anyway, and that was never something I could
recreate for them in her absence, no matter how hard I tried.
In My Conversations with Canadians, Stō:lo writer and Indigenous
literary icon Lee Maracle shares a reaction she had to an Indigenous dance
performance called Agua/Water. Though in front of her eyes there was
dancing, she says, “In my mind, I watched my grandmothers, my great-
grandmothers, hauling McClary stoves across mountain passes, digging
clams whose beds were dying, poisoned by toxic waste that was not to be
cleaned up for over a hundred years. I watched them feed children
consumed with disease and I grieved as I imagined who we might have
been if, when the interlopers came, we had been invited back to the table
they appropriated from our Ta’ahs.” When I think back to that first time I
cooked for my family, I think of Maracle’s words. The food that night was
edible, so technically it was fine. But I wonder what the first meal I cooked
would have been if poverty, violence, mental illness and trauma hadn’t kept
my family in a sort of permanent survival mode. Would my mother have
had the time to teach me how to thaw ground beef? Would she have taught
me how to make a salad, a simple task that still, for some reason,
intimidates me? Would my father have known how to hunt? How to
properly skin a deer and tan a hide? Would he have known better than to
plant an entire field of fruits and vegetables—white corn, tomatoes,
cucumbers, strawberries—on the land across the creek from our trailer,
where it flooded every year without fail, destroying all but the hardiest,
most stubborn plants?
Would my grandmother have taught me how to properly make frybread,
told me how sticky the dough should be, how long it should be left under
the yellow, bubbling oil? Would my aunts have taught me how to plant the
three sisters in traditional Haudenosaunee mounds? The corn steady and
strong in the middle, beans stealthily climbing its stalks, and the squash
spread out around them both, protecting them from weeds and pests? Those
three crops alone had enough nutritional value to sustain our people on a
vegetarian diet. Would we all be lean, strong and healthy if we still lived on
that today?
Maybe if circumstances were different, if history were different, if
trauma hadn’t tattooed itself across my genes, I would be able to move
around my kitchen with ease, knowing exactly what foods I should cook for
my family and exactly how to cook them. Maybe I’d know the land the way
my ancestors wanted me to know it, care for it tenderly, lovingly, the way a
child is supposed to care for their mother.
Maybe I wouldn’t rely on sugary food to see me through my battles with
anxiety and depression, forever chasing the temporary bliss of that first
sweet bite.
My mother loved Smartfood white cheddar popcorn with the same
dangerous ferocity she loved my father. Any time she had an extra couple
bucks, she’d pick up a big bag, which she ate fast and furious. Once she
swallowed a handful of kernels so quickly she started choking, and rather
than stop eating so she could get her throat clear she threw another handful
of popcorn in her mouth.
“What are you doing!” my siblings and I yelled. “Stop eating! You’re
choking!”
We were incredulous, not sure whether to laugh at the absurdity or cover
our mouths in horror. We ended up laughing, as my family tends to do.
Even my mother laughed once she’d stopped coughing. My siblings and I
still bring this memory up from time to time. “What was Mom thinking?”
we ask one another, delirious with laughter, our eyes leaking tears.
How do we break down this cycle of intergenerational trauma and ill
health? By making enough money to afford healthy food, and by ensuring
our children become wealthy enough to afford healthy food, too? By
moving to well-off neighbourhoods in populated cities, where food
insecurity isn’t an issue? Capitalism forever positions itself as the solution
to the problem of capitalism. Colonialism forever positions itself as the
solution to the problem of colonialism. As though shovelling more of what
we’re currently choking on into our mouths would ever actually help us.
I wanted to end this essay with hope, but for a long time I wasn’t sure how.
My experiences with food have been dysfunctional, and though I can
identify that dysfunction, I still haven’t figured out how to change it. How
can I offer hope for others when I can’t find it for myself? When we’re
facing a colonial history that has altered our very DNA?
Recently I read a Facebook post from nêhiyaw writer, activist and self-
described philosopher queen Erica Violet Lee, who said, “If historical
trauma is strong enough to alter our DNA and remain in our bones for
generations, then there is no question in my mind that the love of our
ancestors is in our DNA and our bones as well. The memory of that love is
strong enough that it still exists in us, and in the plants that we have always
cared for.”
Food that carries the love of our ancestors can be medicine—a medicine
that offers something much stronger than whatever temporary feelings of
control or relief I’ve experienced bingeing on triple-chocolate cookies.
Corn, beans and squash were once all my people really needed. They were
so essential to our everyday lives that we referred to them as our sisters. We
would preserve each plant’s seeds and pass them on to our children,
knowing that with this gift, they would be able to provide the same
nutritious food for their families that we provided for them. This was an act
of absolute, undiminished intergenerational love. And if intergenerational
trauma can alter DNA, why can’t intergenerational love?
BOUNDARIES LIKE BRUISES
ur love was a process of unlearning the bad love we’d been given. I
know that now. I feel it when I wipe tears from your cheek, when you
hold me close and stroke my back until the sobbing spasms stop. I feel it
when we stare one another’s traumas down, refuse to tremble, refuse to
break.
We both came from poor families, lugging legacies we never deserved. I
remember the first and last time I kicked you out of anger. We were walking
through the Price Chopper parking lot beside our high school. I did it in
front of my sister and your best friend. You tripped me playfully. I
stumbled, but didn’t fall, and even as my foot connected with your shin, I
thought we would somehow end up laughing. Men getting hurt was funny.
Men getting hurt was normal.
You didn’t laugh. You asked what was wrong with me, and I pretended
not to know. But I knew. Trauma and silence flanked me like foot soldiers,
only they weren’t doing my bidding; I was doing theirs.
You’ve never hit me, kicked me, pushed me, punched me. You’ve barely
even sworn at me. Sometimes I wonder how you conjured up your version
of manhood. You had no father you knew, no grandfathers. You had
professional wrestling during its most misogynistic era and a couple Blink-
182 albums. Neither were particularly revolutionary when it came to their
depictions of masculinity.
That’s not to say we’ve fully shrugged off the roles we’ve been assigned.
You are a man; I am a woman. You are a settler; I’m Onkwehon:we. These
differences are stakes in our ground, mapping boundaries that feel like
bruises. Any time we push against them it hurts, but we both know we must
be more than historical vessels, holding pain; more than performers re-
enacting ancient scripts. Despite our best efforts, different shades of abuse
will still colour our interactions—sometimes soft and diluted like
watercolours, sometimes harsh and angry like charcoal. Cycles are hard to
break.
My parents never broke theirs; after twenty years, the cycle broke them.
Moving to the Six Nations reserve did it. Suddenly, my white mother
became the minority. For the first time she felt her whiteness—no longer a
shield but a siren, screaming inherited histories she’d either never been
taught or been forced to forget. Any time my father tried to connect with his
Haudenosaunee culture she felt it: her whiteness blinding and bright, as if a
spotlight was shone on her.
She wasn’t racist. She couldn’t be. She had a Native husband, Native
children. She lived on a reserve. And yet her white fragility and Catholic
colonialism were racist. She wasn’t happy when my father finally felt pride
in his brown skin. She felt wounded, excluded. She accused him of being
racist against whites. She accused him of committing a mortal sin: turning
his back on the Catholic Church he’d only joined to appease her.
I learned three things watching my mother:
1. No one can fuck their way to tolerance.
2. No one can marry into tolerance.
3. No one can carry for nine months and give birth to tolerance.
I’ve learned more watching you. You don’t flinch when I say the word
“white.” You don’t feel attacked when I discuss colonialism. You encourage
me to spend time with my family and community, to learn my language, to
stand up for my people, to stand up for our land. You encourage our child to
do the same. You see me as a Haudenosaunee woman, love me as a
Haudenosaunee woman, and don’t feel threatened by what that means.
I remember when my father first taught me about the Two Row
Wampum. It was originally a treaty between the Haudenosaunee and the
Dutch, but it was accepted by the Crown, and therefore by Canada. They’ve
never been able to uphold it.
It’s a belt of white wampum beads, representing the river of life. There
are two rows of purple wampum that travel through the centre. One row
represents the ship the settlers are steering; the other represents the canoe
the Haudenosaunee are steering. Each vessel holds those peoples’ culture,
language, history and values. The boat and canoe go down the river of life
together—parallel but never touching, never crossing into the other’s path,
never attempting to steer the other’s vessel or interfere with the other’s
responsibilities. Neither vessel is better than the other. Neither group can
make decisions for the other. It is a treaty based on peace and friendship,
anchored in a deep respect for each culture’s distinct differences.
Because of you, I understand how the Two Row Wampum can be more
than just a treaty between two nations of people; it can be a lived treaty
between two individuals, between us: a Haudenosaunee woman and a
settler man. These boundaries don’t have to be bruises. They can be our
strength.
We untangle the threads of history and treat the wounds we find
underneath. We listen to one another, support one another, resist our
impulses to rewrite one another, to steer one another. We try to understand
our distinct physical, emotional, spiritual and mental needs and meet them
as best we can.
Antiracism is a process. Decolonial love is a process. Our love is a
process. I never want it to end.
ON FORBIDDEN ROOMS AND INTENTIONAL
FORGETTING
nce upon a time there was a man named Bluebeard, a man so wealthy he
was able to buy a string of young wives. None of the relationships
worked out. Still, Bluebeard was persistent. His latest acquisition was a girl
who did not want to marry him but who was dragged down the aisle
nonetheless.
Shortly after their marriage, Bluebeard announced to his wife that he had
to leave on urgent business. He told her to enjoy her time without him, then
handed over a ring of keys. She could use any of the keys, he said—all
except one: a small, rusted key to a closet on the first floor. He led her to the
door, then warned her: “Never open this door or you shall suffer my wrath.”
Though she initially tried to resist, the young wife was so overcome with
curiosity that she had to open the forbidden door. Inside were the dead,
mutilated bodies of all his former wives. As soon as Bluebeard came back
he knew she’d opened the door.
“You must now face my wrath,” he told her, “and join my other wives.”
Naturally, before he could kill his wife, her strapping brothers arrived out of
nowhere and killed Bluebeard. His young wife inherited his fortune.
Apparently she lived happily ever after—whatever that means.
I’ve always been confused by the moral of this story. Charles Perrault,
the most famous chronicler of this tale, suggests the following: “Curiosity,
in spite of its appeal, often leads to deep regret. To the displeasure of many
a maiden, its enjoyment is short lived. Once satisfied, it ceases to exist, and
always costs dearly.” According to Perrault, it seems we’re supposed to
shame Bluebeard’s wife for her curiosity. The problem with that, of course,
is Bluebeard was a serial killer. Behind that forbidden door were dead
women. If she hadn’t used that key, are we supposed to believe that
Bluebeard would have treated her well and grown old with her? That he
would have stopped killing altogether? Somehow I doubt that.
Perrault’s failure to mention the sins of Bluebeard is suspicious, to say
the least. Why doesn’t his moral caution against doing terrible things that
become terrible secrets? Against not only murdering your wives but
foolishly hoping their bodies would be safe in your first-floor closet
forever? If the roles of Bluebeard and his wife were swapped, I have a
feeling this would be the case. Bluebeard wouldn’t be shamed for being
curious. He would be lifted up as a hero: the man who bravely opened the
door his wife demanded stay shut, finally revealing her as the murderous,
manipulative witch she always was.
The real moral of this story, the one Perrault is too cowardly to admit, is
that secrets are allowed to be kept only if they are a man’s secrets. The
woman who threatens to reveal those secrets will live a life of deep regret.
Any enjoyment she may experience will be short lived and cost her dearly.
When I was sexually assaulted I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even let myself
think the words “sexual assault.” My bodily reactions—constant stress,
crying, disordered eating and sleeping, vomiting, wanting to drink during
the day and avoid all sexual contact—were screaming to me that something
was very wrong, but I wilfully ignored the signs, reminding myself that I
was an outspoken feminist who knew all about consent. I wasn’t the type of
woman who got raped.
Meanwhile, the man who sexually assaulted me was sending me threats.
He warned me not to tell anyone what happened. To keep his secret. I
agreed. Even when I couldn’t keep his secret anymore, I still kept it. I told
everyone that what happened was consensual. To this day, I’ve only ever
told three people the truth.
It didn’t matter. He was furious. He retaliated by telling my best friend at
the time an awful story, the details of which I still don’t know. She refused
to speak to me for weeks. When she finally responded to my texts it was
only to tell me to stop texting my rapist. I hadn’t messaged him in days, but
he was still sending me regular death threats. Apparently she hadn’t asked
him to stop texting me.
He’d warned me. Society had warned me. I didn’t listen. Now I was
facing its wrath.
In the days, weeks, months and years following my sexual assault, I’ve
gone over the details in my head many times. I’ve played out alternative
scenarios, tortured myself with how small changes to choices I’d made
could have stopped everything. My inner logic sounds eerily similar to the
logic of attorneys who represent accused rapists. I’ve questioned what I
drank that night, what I wore, what I’d said to my rapist in every interaction
leading up to then, what I’d said to him in every interaction afterwards.
The only thing that has made me feel better is actively distracting myself
from remembering anything at all about that night. At first I was wary of
doing this. There’s a very clear stigma around repression and denial. We are
constantly told that we should face our traumas and work through them.
This is the correct way to heal. But every time I tried to sift sense from my
guilt and pain, all I found was more guilt and pain. Eventually I decided
that, little by little, and as much as I was able, I wanted to forget.
I don’t want this choice to be falsely characterized as denial. I’m not
denying what happened to me. I couldn’t. That night represented a break
between who I was and who I’ve become. I can no more go back to my old
self than cooked food can become raw again.
But I can stop the cycle of torturing myself.
Maybe.
I can try.
Apparently, intentional forgetting is a defence mechanism, which is
somehow different from a conscious coping strategy. I don’t know exactly
what that difference is. Even Phebe Cramer’s study on the difference
between the two, literally titled “Coping and Defense Mechanisms: What’s
the Difference?”, had little to offer. One set of criteria she examined that
tried to differentiate between coping and defence mechanisms was
considered “more a matter of emphasis than critical difference.” Another,
based on how both affect psychological or physical health, was “found to be
without support.”
The obvious differences to me are the negative and positive connotations.
Calling something a “defence mechanism” implies that the person is
accidentally dealing with an issue without meaning to, whereas calling
something a “coping strategy” or “coping mechanism” implies the person is
choosing to deal with that issue. In other words, one is passive and one is
active. Passivity is usually considered a feminine trait, and therefore
undesirable. Being active, on the other hand, is considered inherently
masculine, and therefore aspirational. It’s strange that something like
intentional forgetting, which is done actively, is still considered a passive
defence mechanism. Perhaps not as strange as giving different, arguably
gendered terms to the same healing process, but we are living in a society
that encourages companies to take two of the same razors, paint one pink
and one blue, then charge more money for the pink one. This sort of thing
should probably be expected.
Though intentional forgetting is seen as a bad way to heal, there is
mounting evidence that it is, in fact, a better alternative to intentionally
remembering. The more that we revisit events, the more entrenched they
become in our memory. When those events are traumatic, such as with a
sexual assault, they have negative emotions attached to them, which are
nearly impossible to separate from the memories themselves. Continually
revisiting these negative memories not only keeps those memories fresh; it
also keeps the person remembering them from feeling good.
This is similar to the way that depression works. As Jutta Joormann,
Paula T. Hertel, Faith Brozovich and Ian H. Gotlib explain in their study
“Remembering the Good, Forgetting the Bad: Intentional Forgetting of
Emotional Material in Depression,” depressed people have a tendency to
almost continually reflect on their past. Their tendency to not only dwell on
past events but conjure up negative thoughts and memories creates a cycle
of negativity they cannot seem to escape:
At the same time that depressed individuals hold positive beliefs about
rumination as a coping strategy, they hold negative beliefs about the
uncontrollability of rumination. Thus, depressed individuals might
deliberately engage in rumination in an attempt to solve their problems
but then become overwhelmed by negative thoughts about their
ruminations.
They conclude that a depressed person’s tendency to dwell on negative
memories and thoughts instead of actively suppressing them is an
unfortunate, cyclical part of depression. Further, they suggest training
depressed people to intentionally forget “could prove to be an effective
strategy.”
Maybe trying to forget your trauma isn’t as unhealthy as we thought.
I feel the need to make myself clear: I’m not encouraging survivors of
sexual assault to stay silent. It’s very important that survivors disclose what
happened to them to people they trust, so those people can support the
survivor in whatever ways they need. But the amount of detail that we go
into when we decide to disclose our assault should always be up to us.
It’s natural to have questions for sexual assault survivors. People may
even think they’re doing us a favour by persuading us to tell them
everything that happened. After all, the truth supposedly sets us free. But
isn’t the most important truth that we were assaulted? Isn’t that enough? Or
must we relive our pain in agonizing detail so other people’s curiosity is
quenched?
I keep coming back to Bluebeard’s forbidden room. I have one, too. Instead
of being full of the corpses of former lovers, though, mine holds a memory
of that night. It’s projected on the wall in an endless loop. Every time I
watch it I criticize myself mercilessly, stupidly hoping that if I watch it long
enough the ending will change. Of course it never does.
I hate this room. I hate what it holds, what it makes me feel, what it
makes me think. Whenever I can escape, I lock it up tight. I pass the key off
to someone I trust and try to forget any of it exists.
Because I’m a woman, though, once I’ve handed you the key to this
room, I have no control over whether you choose to open it. My secrets are
never really mine.
When I was a child my mother told me about Jesus’s resurrection. He told
his apostles he would rise again on the third day after his death. When that
third day came and he appeared to them in Galilee, Thomas didn’t believe it
was him. Who would believe something like that? It goes against our
understanding of the world. Jesus may have been the son of God, but he
was dead. He couldn’t come back.
The only way Jesus could convince Thomas he was, in fact, himself was
by letting him put his fingers in his open wounds. Thomas gouged the holes
where nails had gone through Jesus’s hands and feet, slid his own hands
inside the wide gash in Jesus’s side. Only when Thomas examined the
evidence of his lord’s pain first-hand was that pain finally made real to him.
Only when Thomas felt the contours of Jesus’s torture was Jesus himself
made real to him. He had no problems believing once Jesus offered up his
trauma as proof.
As a child, this story disturbed me. I imagined Jesus wincing with pain as
Thomas examined his body, his hands emerging dripping with blackening
blood. What kind of friend was he? Why did his belief hinge on such grisly
proof? How did this make Jesus feel, that his best friend wouldn’t believe
him unless he let him violate his body?
I often wonder about this burden of proof. Is my pain valid only when
someone bears witness to it? Must I be hypervigilant about my entire
person, always? Make sure that my face is composed in the perfect
silhouette of trauma—any hint of a smile hastily swept away—whenever I
expect someone to believe me? Must I forsake all joy, all warmth, to take
up my role as “perfect victim”? As if ever experiencing happiness again
were somehow evidence that I never experienced agony, anguish?
Maybe this is why I’ve told so few people.
There is a performative nature to pain. It’s never just for us; it’s also for
those around us. In case I happen to forget this in my own life, I have plenty
of reminders. For example, the case of Amanda Knox.
Knox, a twenty-year-old American living in Perugia, Italy, returned home
after spending the night with her boyfriend. She found her flatmate,
Meredith Kercher, murdered and called the police. One of the lead
detectives noticed that Knox was not crying hysterically, as he assumed she
should be. Instead, she was kissing her boyfriend—something he reasoned
that no innocent woman would ever do after her flatmate was found
murdered. Her response to trauma was so far from what this detective
deemed the “right” response, she became the main suspect in the murder
case.
No evidence connected her to the murder. No blood, no DNA, no motive.
The prosecution had to conjure up a ridiculous story that maintained that
Knox somehow killed Kercher without leaving any DNA evidence, while
another suspect, Rudy Guede, left DNA all over the room. It didn’t matter.
Knox still was convicted and imprisoned for four years before being retried
and, eventually, acquitted.
If Amanda Knox had performed her trauma properly, maybe she
wouldn’t have been treated, tried and imprisoned as a criminal.
If I’d performed my trauma properly—cried in front of family and friends,
poured big glugs of vodka into my orange juice while they were watching,
thrown up on their shoes instead of in the toilet of a private bathroom stall
—maybe they wouldn’t have been so quick to believe me when I lied and
told them that I’d wanted it.
I never know when I’m allowed to feel my pain and when I must put it
away for the sake of company. People may want me to cry in front of them
initially, to “prove” myself, to make them feel a part of my pain, but they
don’t want that proof—or pain—to last forever. They don’t want me to start
hyperventilating while we’re watching an episode of Girls that
unexpectedly deals with rape. They certainly don’t want me to ruin their
outing to Banff’s Cave and Basin by having a breakdown when a strange
man pushes past me.
These displays are not cute. They’re not “healing.” They’re inconvenient:
intrusions of real-world ugliness that disrupt the collective illusion of
perfect put-togetherness. Despite this idea that we as survivors should
share, that we should remember and then move past our pain, that we
should “deal” with our issues, there are very few places any of us can show
our scars without being shamed. If we slip up and accidentally let our
trauma overtake us in public or at the wrong moment, we are treated with
shock and disdain—as though showing human emotion makes us somehow
less than human.
I suppose I should stop being so surprised when we’re treated as less than
human. After all, the trial of Cindy Gladue’s murderer was in 2015, and the
levels of dehumanization the Canadian courts allowed to take place during
it are enough to make a person physically ill. I would rather not go into the
details of the sexual assault that led to her death, which are incredibly
disturbing. Instead, I would like to emphasize that Gladue was a thirty-six-
year-old Métis woman with three teenage daughters. She was struggling to
overcome addiction, but she was still a person, she still experienced joy.
She liked cooking shows, made legendary apple crisps, loved to draw and
listen to Mötley Crüe. She sang Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” to her
daughters to lull them to sleep. She was loving. She was loved.
During the trial, photos of Gladue’s dead body were shown in front of her
mother without warning, the disturbing image imprinted in her mind
forever. Gladue’s vaginal tissue, the most private part of her body, was
entered into court evidence and displayed to a roomful of strangers. This
was the first time human tissue had ever been accepted as evidence in a trial
—an unprecedented move that was apparently required to convince an all-
white jury that Gladue, an Indigenous woman who performed sex work,
deserved justice when she was murdered. She still didn’t get that justice.
Her murderer was cleared of all charges, which meant her body was further
violated after her death for no reason. Her trauma was put on display in a
desperate attempt to shock jury members into feeling empathy for someone
they’d been told their whole lives wasn’t a real person; to remind jury
members that her murderer, a white man, the type they’d been told their
whole lives to make excuses and allowances for, was deserving of
punishment this time instead of more excuses and allowances.
That’s the unspoken truth about these pleas for our stories, and these
criminal trials. They’re never just a presentation of the facts. They’re
arguments—and one side is much easier to argue than the other. Arguing for
a woman to be considered a liar in a society that has hammered in our
inherent unreliability is not difficult at all. Arguing for us to be believed is
much more challenging.
Similarly, arguing that a manipulative woman is making false claims of
rape to get “even” with an innocent man is not hard; it’s merely spitting
back up the same ideas about men and women we’ve all been forced to
swallow for centuries. But arguing that a woman deserves the right to police
the boundaries of her own body—boundaries that are continually,
sometimes violently broken by men who have been taught to disregard
women’s active, informed consent—is a task similar to Sisyphus rolling a
boulder up a hill, waiting for it to roll back down and crush him. It’s
contrary to all that we’ve been taught about women and men. It questions
the very legitimacy of Western misogyny, and thus, Western society.
In other words, it’s blasphemy.
People are willing to believe anything that reinforces their unexamined
view of the world, no matter how far it strains the laws of physics, decency
and common sense. They’ll believe Gladue consented to the sexual assault
that ended up killing her. They’ll believe that Knox was a crime-scene
mastermind able to erase only her own DNA from a murder scene. They’ll
believe that you, nearly blackout drunk and crawling over train tracks
minutes before, were in a perfect state of mind to consent to sex, and did.
And the only way to even attempt to convince them otherwise is to let them
stick their fingers in your bloody wounds. Give them details you’d rather
not relive. Let them see. Let them feel. Let them taste. Your comfort,
consent and mental health didn’t matter before. Why should they matter
now? You want them to believe you, don’t you? Don’t you?
If we aren’t required to give consent or allowed to refuse consent when it
comes to recounting our own trauma, what is left for us? The men who
carry out this violence against us don’t have to testify in their own defence,
yet we have to relive our trauma to prove our innocence. Our innocence is
always what’s really on trial, not these men’s guilt.
I suspect men who rape don’t encounter anywhere near as many
questions in their daily life about what they did and why as those they
raped. They don’t have to watch people evaluate every last detail of their
appearance, mindset, alcohol level, sexual history, actions leading up to the
assault and following the assault, as they weigh whether or not to believe
them. I suspect they don’t have panic attacks or hyperventilate on occasions
when people ask these questions. I suspect they don’t even feel any guilt.
After all, they were just doing what society has told them they have always
had a right to do.
When I advocate for my right to forget about my sexual assault, I’m
advocating for the same right my assaulter has been given. I’m advocating
for people to believe me with the same blind faith people believed my
assaulter. I’m advocating for the right to move on with my life, the same
way my assaulter is allowed to move on with his. I’m advocating for the
right to be occasionally happy, the chance to achieve my goals, to be
considered more than someone’s victim. Had I taken my assaulter to court,
his lawyer would have made the same argument about him: that he has the
right to be happy, to achieve his goals, to be considered more than
someone’s assaulter. That argument would more than likely get him cleared.
Even though only the strongest sexual assault cases even go to trial, only 42
percent come back with a guilty verdict. Sexual assault has one of the
smallest conviction rates of violent crime in Canada.
When you take two of the same thing and paint one pink and one blue,
why does the pink one always cost more?
Here are other morals of other stories: Survivors should not have to live
lives of deep regret for other people’s actions.
Another person’s decision to commit a crime against us should never cost
us more dearly than it costs the person who committed the crime.
Our trauma is not something we should ever be expected to supply upon
demand.
Healing is not the same for everyone.
My trauma is locked inside a room. I want to ask everyone to leave it the
hell alone, but I worry that if I even mention it, someone will break open
the door and gape at my pain without my permission. Or shame me as
“unhealthy” because I won’t lock myself inside that room and watch myself
get hurt over and over. Or torture me with the same thoughts I use to torture
myself.
Or.
Or.
Or.
I deserve to have the key to my own memories, my own trauma. I
deserve to decide when and with whom I share that trauma. I deserve the
right to move on—or not.
I deserve what my rapist never gave me: a choice.
CRUDE COLLAGES OF MY MOTHER
haven’t seen my mother in more than five years. I haven’t seen her the
way I choose to remember her for much longer. Her unmatched energy,
her unabashed goofiness, her unvarnished love. And her smile. It’s been a
long time since I’ve seen that.
I could never objectively assess her beauty. Her personality eclipsed her
features—one of those rare people who is somehow above menial things
like physical appearance. She radiated outward. In my mind she is forever
tinged by orange light—a sunset, perhaps, or an open flame. The further I
get from that person, that vision, the more I try to write her into existence—
a literary séance I hope will inch closer to catharsis. But words haven’t
alleviated my guilt, and words definitely haven’t helped her navigate the
systems that have shoved her and held her down. It’s that part of her life
which I labour to forget, to my nausea and shame.
My mother has bipolar disorder. I have never liked the starkness of that
word, “bipolar.” In three syllables it eschews all nuance and subtlety. A
word so strong even I tend to think of her in terms of her position between
these two theoretical “poles” instead of as a living, breathing human with a
range of emotions. Is she depressed this time, or manic? Sleeping too much,
or not enough? In every conversation we have, I attempt to dictate her
mental health, or rewrite her history, or diagnose her emotions until they’re
mere clinical terms. After all, I’m the sane one.
My mother has so many odd facets of her life and personality that piecing
everything together is like viewing a Tom Wesselmann collage: there is a
surprised satisfaction in recognizing the disparate parts, a strange
contentment in realizing such different parts form such a complete work,
then finally an unsettling sense of wrongness once one considers how
contradictory those parts are. If I were to make a list of descriptors that
could define my mother in order of what I consider to be most important to
her, it would look like this:
1. Mother of eight
2. White (ex)wife to Tuscarora man (Race supposedly not important to
her, but important nonetheless.)
3. Fervent Catholic (Could explain 1.)
4. Computer genius (Offered a job by NASA, turned down so my older
sister with cerebral palsy could stay at the facility she was in.)
5. Kung fu master (Sixth-degree black belt, to be exact.)
I could add other things, like her star athleticism and resultant eating
disorder in high school, or her contradictory food bingeing and weight gain
in married life, or the history of mental illness in her family (her closest
brother committed suicide; her youngest brother struggled with addiction
for over twenty years; her mother dealt with dementia; I suspect her father
had schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, since he was prescribed Lithium, but
there’s no one left who will tell me). I could bring up the isolation she felt
being dragged from America to the Six Nations reserve in Canada without
any legal protection or permission. All of those are only parts.
The last time I saw her sick (again those poles! As if she could be simply
classified as merely “sick” or “healthy”) she was homeless and had just
gotten out of jail. My dad had had her arrested for stabbing a holiday cookie
tin and leaving it on the porch, or as the courts called it, “threats” and
“domestic abuse.” A restraining order and a week in jail later, she was out
on bail and visiting me at work. She approached the lottery kiosk I was
working at narrow-eyed, headband pulled across her head the way women
did in the early ’90s. Her personal style was like a testament to the time
before my dad, a time capsule she couldn’t bury. I could see the illness
starting to work its way under her skin, transforming her. Her entire face
looked different when she was manic. Her pupils were giant, surrounded by
only small circles of green. Her lips were curled in a grimace, wrinkles like
parentheses around her mouth, crescents of blue-tinged skin drooping
below her eyes. And her jaw always set as if she were waiting for a fight.
Within a week of her release my mom went missing. My sister and I
found her charging down the street in downtown Brantford, her lips moving
fast as she yelled at no one and everyone. We managed to get her back to
my place. Pacing, shaking, eyeballs darting, muscles tensing. I’ll never
forget the way she looked at the TV in my living room as she told me
someone was listening to us from inside it. There was unshakable
confidence in that look.
I’m not sure what she remembers of all this, if she remembers anything.
She could argue with surprising credibility that nothing was wrong with her
at all, that she just had post-traumatic stress disorder. She’d say it calmly
and coolly, as if post-traumatic stress was something a person agreed to
during a marriage ceremony with a decisive “I do.” But then I’d mention
things she’d rather forget. The time she tried to rip our thirty-two-inch TV
from the wall because it was evil. The time she trashed our house with the
destructive artistry of an entitled rock star. The time she thought demons
were in our trailer. She threw a knife at the couch right next to me in an
attempt to “kill them.” If I bring this up with her, she tells me that she didn’t
think there were demons at all; she was just really angry; I’m making it all
up. I wonder whether she really believes that or if it’s something she has to
believe.
Recently I’ve read about people with bipolar disorder experiencing
memory loss. One person, a computer programmer like my mother, was
unable to keep his job because things he knew before he got sick apparently
flew to the farthest recesses of his mind once bipolar disorder set in. The
theory is that the bipolar person is too stimulated when manic to focus on
what’s happening around them, making it difficult to create new memories.
When depressed, the person feels too bad about themselves to see anything
but their perceived flaws, thus nothing is remembered but the feeling of
worthlessness. But what about good old-fashioned repression? What of not
wanting to remember the things you did when you were on sensory
overload, or the people who had to tend to you when you were so depressed
you couldn’t bathe yourself? Who would want to remember their kids’
muffled cries from another room, their small bodies tense and taut as violin
strings?
Most of the time when we talk, my mother and I just pretend nothing
ever happened, though the evidence of it is always there. Everything we say
to one another bears the weight of our unacknowledged, ever-present,
fucked-up family history. I can’t look at her or talk to her without feeling it,
darting in and out of my mind’s peripherals like some thick-limbed jungle
cat. There’s only so much a person can repress.
Ironically, it has always helped me to split my mom in two: Normal Mom
and Bipolar Mom. Whenever I have to interact with Bipolar Mom, I seem
to entirely forget Normal Mom, the mom I love, who knew my schoolgirl
crushes and laughed at every one of my terrible jokes and pushed aside her
steadfast religion to help me through my teenage pregnancy. I think of
Bipolar Mom as something entirely other, a beast so terrible that it doesn’t
deserve the courtesy of courtesy. I wonder if my mother thinks the same
thing of herself, if she compartmentalizes things she has done and labels
them “Under the Influence of Bipolar” or “Entirely Mine.” Maybe she
doesn’t think about these things at all. Maybe she can’t.
Kanye West revealed he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder on his 2018
album, “Ye.” Across the cover, over a moody image of mountains and
swirling clouds, are the words:
I hate being
Bi-Polar
its awesome
I wasn’t surprised. I’ve always analyzed the erratic behaviour of others,
mentally checking off symptoms before confidently, quietly announcing to
my husband, “That person reminds me of my mom. They probably have
bipolar disorder.” I said this about Britney Spears in 2007, when now-
infamous photos emerged of her swinging a green umbrella at a
photographer—her head freshly shaved, her eyes dark pits that looked but
didn’t seem to see. I said this about a complete stranger on the streets of
Toronto asking for change who, when I gave him some of my change but
not all of it, started following me, spitting insults with an anger that vibrated
on another frequency. I said this about Kanye when I saw him perform live
in 2013. Three-quarters of the way through his incredible two-hour-long set
he gave a rambling fifteen-minute speech that started with a declaration
that, despite portrayals to the contrary, he wasn’t angry at all, that he was
“extremely happy.” As his words tumbled out and tangled up, Kanye never
worried whether we were following his logic. He didn’t seem to care. “If I
say something completely stupid, completely fucked, it don’t matter,” he
said. “If I say something that’s completely inspiring…take that with you,
apply that to your life.” He spoke with the focus and confidence of a
motivational speaker. He spoke until he felt like stopping.
I saw all of these symptoms when my mother was manic: the eyes of
Britney, the anger of the stranger, the conviction of Kanye. When she was
manic she would talk for hours, usually about my father and all the fucked-
up things he’d done to her. She’d talk until her throat was raw and her voice
rasping. She’d talk even if it was two in the morning and the person she was
talking at was trying to sleep. It didn’t faze her. After all, she wasn’t having
a conversation, not really. She was delivering a sermon. We kids were
supposed to nod at her accusations and revelations like true believers at
church, affirming everything she said as though hers was the very voice of
God. If she asked a yes or no question, her gaze fiery and fixed and waiting
for our response, and we gave the wrong answer, her voice would become
louder, sharper. “Oh, you don’t think he’s irresponsible? Do you have any
idea how much money he owes your grandmother? Do you know what he
did with that money?” We could either continue to question her account of
our father, ensuring we were screamed at for hours, or we could ridicule
him, too, hoping that with Mom’s aim trained back on its original target, we
could slink away, unnoticed.
This was life with Mom’s mania: the anger, the yelling, the way she’d
keep us all up, even on school nights, because the entire world needed to
know what was on her mind. Aunts, uncles, cousins, cashiers, neighbours,
priests, teachers, police officers—all of them would hear her. God himself
would hear her. She made sure of it.
All the while I felt like I was being swallowed by quicksand. I had to
make sure my younger siblings had dinner, that the food didn’t erupt in
flames because Mom left it unattended to send dozens of emails to strangers
in Sweden about investing in her computer business. I had to argue with my
mother when she decided Resident Evil—the game we played together as a
family for years—was demonic and needed to be removed from the house
so our family could heal. I had to go to school every day and pretend that I
was happy and whole and got more than three hours of sleep.
Unlike our father, I couldn’t just drive off and stay away until eleven at
night, pretending Mom didn’t exist. As soon as I got home from school, I
had to endure every minute of her illness along with her. I have no idea
where my father went all those hours, all those days. He didn’t have a job
half the time, he didn’t volunteer anywhere, he didn’t bring home friends.
All I knew was he was gone and we were alone and I hated him for it. I
hated my mother, too—for scaring Dad away, for staying with him, for
reminding me that a calm house was a privilege.
I hated her being bipolar most of all.
Just before Mom’s brain was firing too fast to let her sleep, before her
repressed anger could boil over and burn everyone around her, there was a
period that all of us loved. We loved it so much we refused to admit it was
connected to her bipolar disorder. For the days or weeks she inhabited that
liminal space it was as though she had complete control of the best parts of
her personality. She was charming, funny, excited. A current of electricity
ran through her, lighting her eyes and words. When she was like this we
couldn’t help ourselves; we twisted ourselves over and around one another
like weeds to capture the warmth of her full attention. We’d gather around,
waiting for her to do a goofy dance, or buy a tub of ice cream so we could
make sundaes, or watch the Mortal Kombat movie with us again, leaping up
to show us kung fu during the fight scenes. She was more fun than any
other mom we’d ever known.
Six months from now, she’d say, we’re going to be rich, and then she’d
buy us everything we’d ever wanted: art supplies, a canopy bed, a whole
new wardrobe, a mansion with an indoor swimming pool and big-screen
TVs in every room, a Jacuzzi hot tub, a complete set of holographic
Pokémon cards. Even our dad couldn’t resist the fairy tale. He’d listen, rapt,
as she laid out the latest business plan or pyramid scheme she was sure
would get us rich quick. All it would cost is an initial investment of
$299.99, which we’d make back within a month. She’d sit at the computer,
her fingers tapping out possibilities on the keyboard, her eyes darting,
searching for the best opportunity a banner ad could sell. She’d stay up late,
get up early, her face constantly awash in the blue glow of the monitor.
Then she’d become obsessed, easily irritated, her laughter skittering to a
stop and her jokes morphing to sharp chastisements whenever we
interrupted her. That was about the time the fun part of her mania
seamlessly transformed into the difficult part.
Just before that, though, if you were to tell us that the excitement and
energy we loved so much were part of Mom’s mania, that her hard work
and hustle were at their height when she was manic, that she was at her
most hilarious, fun and focused then, we’d probably say her bipolar was
awesome, too. It was always awesome until it wasn’t.
As a child, and even as a teen, when my father told me the signs that my
mother’s mental health was deteriorating, I believed him. I believed that
identifying these signs, collecting them like baseball cards, and shoving
them before her face to stare at when she was at her most argumentative—
or most depressed—was being a good partner. I believed that forcing her
into a car, turning on the child locks so she couldn’t jump out and shuttling
her over the border, where New York laws would allow her to be
involuntarily admitted to the mental hospital, was the only way to support a
mentally ill person.
I began to question these assumptions when I grew up, primarily because
I became the partner of a person with severe clinical depression. Mike had a
rough time with his depression in university and barely finished his classes.
He would cry in bed almost every day the last year of school, saying awful,
untrue things about himself, often wanting to hurt himself, even kill
himself. I had no idea what to do. My experience with my mother hadn’t
prepared me for this. I only knew how my father would approach the
situation: forced hospitalization and medication. But I also remembered
how traumatized my mother was by those hospitalizations; I remembered
when she couldn’t recall simple words because her medication interfered
with her brain too badly, how she’d eventually erupt in frustrated tears. I
didn’t want those things for Mike. I didn’t want them for her, either. Instead
of getting cops or doctors involved, I tried to talk Mike through his
depression, countering the negative self-talk in his head with all the
evidence his depressed brain wouldn’t let him see. You’re not a bad person.
You’re not a burden. You are not your depression. I looked up how to talk to
suicidal people, learned the crucial difference between passive thoughts of
dying, thoughts of suicide and active plans for suicide. Somehow, despite
my fumbled attempts to support him, Mike managed to pull himself out of
the depression—and somehow I managed to convince myself that his
depression was a one-time thing.
When it came back every year or so over the next ten years, it would hit
with the force of a fighter jet. I tried to find ways to help. I read books about
supporting depressed partners. I persuaded Mike to go to a therapist. I
supported him when he and the therapist decided their four sessions were
all he needed. I convinced him to go on medication. I supported him when
he insisted on taking himself off medication to save our family money. I
didn’t always agree with his decisions, but they were his decisions to make.
I didn’t want him to feel as though my opinions on his treatment mattered
more than his, the way my father had with my mother. I kept wondering
what would have happened if my dad had talked to my mom about her
experiences, consulted with her about her treatment, let her have some
autonomy over what happened to her body and mind. Would she have
accepted that she had bipolar disorder years ago? Gone through the long,
gruelling process of figuring out a treatment plan and support system that
allowed her to have a more stable life? Or would everything be exactly the
same, with Mom still struggling to admit her diagnosis today?
Here’s the thing: despite criticizing my mother for not admitting her mental
illness, and despite assuring my husband that depression was nothing to be
ashamed of, it took me until I was twenty-six to admit that I had severe
depression and anxiety. I didn’t want to admit that the creeping ivy of my
mother’s genetics had taken hold in my mind, climbing its walls, obscuring
every good part of my life. I saw the way Mom was treated by police,
doctors, nurses, cashiers, total strangers and family members. They could
all tell that there was something different about her; they would look at her
with a mixture of fear and revulsion, as if she were a rabid dog. I didn’t
want to be looked at and dehumanized that way. I was terrified that if I
admitted my problems to myself, every person who thought of me as
strong, put-together and fearless would see my mental illness peeking out
from behind my eyes and turn on me, the way everyone had eventually
turned on my mom. History would repeat itself through me.
I had always asked Mom, Why can’t you admit there’s something wrong
with you? Now I knew. With Mike’s unending love and support, I
eventually admitted my mental health issues. Still, it took another four years
for me to work up the nerve to ask my doctor for medication, and another
six months after that for me to realize that I should probably take it every
day as prescribed. There was another question I’d always asked Mom: Why
can’t you just take your meds? I knew that now, too.
Just before I decided to go back on my medication, I cried every day. You’re
not a bad person. You’re not a burden. You are not your depression, I told
myself, repeating the words I used to say to Mike until they tasted like ash
on my tongue. I didn’t believe any of them. I couldn’t. The depression made
that impossible.
It’s easy to tell a person who has a physical illness that they are not their
cold, or their diabetes, or their stroke. Their illness is something that
happens to them, affects their life—sometimes in incredibly difficult ways
—but it still isn’t them. It’s harder to make that distinction when you have a
mental illness that completely changes the way you express your
personality, the way you interact with others, the way you see the world.
Where do you end and where does your sickness begin?
When I was at a writing residency a few years ago, I read from a piece that
took my experience of depression and heavily fictionalized it, turning the
worst experience of my life into what I hoped was art. One of the mentors
of the program approached me afterwards, expressing how much she could
relate to the narrator’s hatred of her good, loving husband because she’d felt
the same way about a really great person she’d once dated. I explained to
her that wasn’t what was going on, that my narrator didn’t hate her husband
at all, that her undiagnosed depression was convincing her that she did. The
mentor gave me a blank look and claimed she didn’t understand. I tried
again, telling her the narrator’s emotions were based on how I felt about
myself when I was depressed. I would dwell on everything wrong with me,
telling myself that I was unlovable, that I was better off dead. But I didn’t
actually feel that way most of the time. Depression had slid over my eyes
like a lens, tinting everything I saw, thought and experienced until I no
longer remembered what life was like before.
“I still don’t get it. How do you know what’s you and what’s the
depression?”
Nothing I said would make her understand. She clearly hadn’t
experienced the sort of depression I had, so anything I said would be
theoretical to her, a thought exercise instead of a devastating, ongoing lived
experience. Often, deep in my sickness, I’d wonder whether depression was
my natural state. Maybe there was no point to anything, and all the things I
could possibly do or experience were just a series of shallow attempts to
distract myself from the bottomless void of life. That very well could be
true, but having known the depths of depression intimately meant that I
would no longer be tactless enough to ask a person with mental health
issues a question like that. It meant I would have empathy for others with
depression, that I wouldn’t call those who lost their battle with depression
“cowards” or “selfish” or “assholes” for committing suicide. It also meant I
would appreciate being healthy much more than if I’d never been
depressed.
“You don’t know what’s you and what’s the depression when you’re still
depressed,” I finally answered. “That’s why it sucks so much.”
X-Men character Jean Grey has an evil alter ego named Dark Phoenix. Dark
Phoenix is unbridled power, a god that cares for nothing and no one, being
channelled through the compassionate, heroic Jean Grey. Once she is Jean
Grey again, and has to deal with the consequences of her actions as Dark
Phoenix, she is grief-ridden. Her friends try to tell her it wasn’t her who did
those things, it was the Phoenix, but Jean Grey realizes that even though she
and Phoenix are separate, they’re bound together. One cannot exist without
the other, and so long as Jean Grey lives, Dark Phoenix will eventually
manifest. Eventually Jean Grey volunteers to be killed so Dark Phoenix can
never take control of her again.
It seems to me my mother is often at the mercy of her sickness, waiting
for her own Dark Phoenix to take hold. So is Mike. So am I. And though I
try to mentally split my mother in two, to make her “Normal” or “Bipolar,”
she isn’t. She deserves a fuller range of adjectives and acknowledgements
than that. I may not understand her with the conviction I feel I understand a
good literary character, or have perfect bouquets of flowery memories
unmarred by pain, but I do think I know her. Distance may make the picture
fuzzy, but it always does. Crude collaging may, indeed, be the only way to
reassemble her person and our past. But really, is that any different than
what we do with anyone? Sculpt people into the archetypes we prefer to
imagine instead of the people they are? Isn’t that why it offends us so much
when those we love do something that makes no sense to us, even when to
them it’s an obvious and perhaps inevitable choice?
It’s hard to let go of control, to stop trying to be the architect of not only
our own lives but the lives of the people around us as we single-mindedly
work towards our own flawed constructions of “perfection.” Once we do,
though, we might actually be able to recognize the beauty we’ve missed.
Witness the glimpses of unplanned perfection that have been there all along,
perhaps hidden in the few rushed lines of a Facebook message, or in an
unasked-for Catechism bought and mailed after months of scrimping and
saving, or in the eyes of a mother whose life may have never been easy but
whose love has always, always prevailed, ensuring her daughter would
prevail, too.
NOT YOUR NOBLE SAVAGE
have a confession to make: I’ve never danced in a powwow. Not unless
you count awkward shuffle steps self-consciously made during intertribal
dances, which no one should. “Intertribals” are when the MC invites all
onlookers—regardless of experience—out of the bleachers and into the
arena to dance. They’re basically the powwow equivalent of having a
karaoke break during a concert. Why would anyone want to see the
rhythmically challenged when they can watch professionals? They don’t.
It’s a nice gesture, but ultimately an embarrassing affair all around.
Despite my lineage and fervent passion for long braids, I am most
definitely not a professional dancer. This is distressing news, I know. After
all, what kind of Indian woman can’t dance to drums to please the colonial
eye? Believe me when I say this was not the way I wanted it. My cousins
were entered in the Grand River Champion of Champions Pow Wow every
year. I’d watch them sweating in their regalia, so painstakingly beaded by
my aunt, a dull envy swirling in my gut. The moment they left their outfits
unattended, I’d appear as if summoned by dark magic to surreptitiously run
my fingers over the raised, precise beadwork and velvet inlays, the feathers
and bells. This was being Indian, I’d thought. It had a certain amount of
pageantry to it; it was showy and fun. And judging by the number of newly
bought dreamcatchers proudly hanging from their rear-view mirrors, non-
Native Canadians seemed to agree.
So imagine my surprise when, in 2006, during the land reclamation in
Caledonia, Ontario, the same Canadians who came to see my family
members dance every year started screaming obscenities at us from their
minivans, their dreamcatchers gently blowing in the wind as they passed
our occupation at Kahnestaton. They couldn’t hurl empty coffee cups or
racial slurs fast enough. Our treaties didn’t matter, nor did our concerns.
Apparently, we were to be tolerated only in a very specific context. We
could entertain them every summer and pose in photos with their children,
sure, but attempting to assert sovereignty over our lands elicited moral
outrage on par with drowning kittens. Maybe if we’d worn powwow
dresses and brought a drumming group, they’d have been more receptive.
This seems to be Canada’s preferred image of Indigenous peoples. Not
the modern Native girl in a sweatshirt and jeans trying to figure out how she
fits in “Reconciliation© Canada.” No. They want the “genuine artifact”: the
stoic Indian man decked out in beads and leather, who has not one ounce of
white blood because that would taint his authenticity. He’s managed to
dodge assimilationist policies the way superheroes dodge bullets.
Preferably, he’s just stepped out of a DeLorean into 2017 immediately after
learning that charming stilted English so clearly realized by Johnny Depp’s
Tonto. (Although, as recent events have shown, should the genuine artifact
be unavailable, Canada will happily accept a handsome, agreeable white
dude with tenuous Indigenous “roots” as a substitute.)
Settlers prefer this stereotypical, impossible image because it means they
can outsource their guilt. Instead of actually dealing with the consequences
of historical genocidal policies—policies that are still in place—they can
pretend that assimilation settled over our people like a gentle fog. It was
entirely natural; no one is to blame. Certainly not them. They like Indians.
They named a few sports teams after them, after all. They also read The
Orenda and it, like, changed their lives. But these same settlers will not
listen to the voices of real-life Indigenous people and, further, seem unable
to realize that by expecting us to be their Ideal Indian Caricatures, they’re
adding another layer of colonial trauma to our already overburdened
peoples.
Within the past few decades, there’s been a surge of Indigenous voices in
the literary community writing against these harmful histories and images:
Lee Maracle, Eden Robinson, Thomas King, Richard Wagamese, Tracey
Lindberg, Katherena Vermette and Tomson Highway. Yet even those
successful writers have been subject to what I’ll call “literary colonialism”:
insidious criticisms—almost always from non-Indigenous people—that not
only reflect but reinforce troubling attitudes of colonial ownership over
Indigenous people within the literary community. These include policing
what Native writers can write about, and even whether they count as Native
at all. Like those powwow spectators throwing garbage out of their
minivans, those enforcing literary colonialism want us to stick to our script.
This kind of criticism is nothing new, of course. When Margaret Atwood
wrote her foundational work on Canadian literature, Survival: A Thematic
Guide to Canadian Literature, she happened to leave a considerable hole in
her literary account of the country: she didn’t reference a single Native
author. Considering her book posited that Canadian literature consisted of
different types of “victims” surviving their circumstances, and the Canadian
body politic has victimized Indigenous peoples since before Confederation,
this omission is particularly ironic. It should be noted, however, that there
was a chapter that examined non-Native writers’ fictive portrayals of
Indigenous peoples, rather tellingly entitled “First People: Indians and
Eskimos as Symbols.” In her essay “A Double-Bladed Knife: Subversive
Laughter in Two Stories by Thomas King,” Atwood excuses her exclusion,
saying she simply couldn’t find any Native writing. One questions her due
diligence when she follows up her semi-apology with this rather ridiculous
contradiction: “Why did I overlook Pauline Johnson? Perhaps because,
being half-white, she somehow didn’t rate as the real thing, even among
Natives; although she is undergoing reclamation today.”
There’s a lot going on in this one sentence that I want to unpack, chief
among them the seemingly arbitrary declaration that Tekahionwake, or
Pauline Johnson, is not “the real thing” because she’s half-white. Putting
aside for a moment that she wrote this statement in an essay praising Native
author Thomas King—the son of a Cherokee father and a Swiss, German
and Greek, i.e. white, mother—let’s consider Canada’s history of dictating
Native identity. After all, there has to be a reason non-Native people feel
they’re so damn good at determining “the real thing.”
Part of building a nation is dismantling all that undermines it. In
Canada’s case, the dubious honour of undermining the nation falls to
Indigenous peoples. While Britain, and by extension Canada, did not take
the absurd route of Australia and declare a clearly populated land mass to
be terra nullius, or vacant land, they didn’t exactly shake hands and
promise to leave us alone, either. Since the passing of the Indian Act in
1876, Canada has been in the business of doing exactly what those
Caledonia citizens felt so entitled to do: determine our lives—and lands—
for us. Where we could go, what we could do, how our lineage could pass
down to new generations, what we could name ourselves, what we could
teach our children, what ceremonies of ours we could legally engage in. All
of it was dictated to us in this racist document.
In a stroke of colonial genius, the Indian Act also defined who could
actually be Indian. You may have thought you were an Indian, seeing as
that’s what white Canadians called you, sometimes preceded by an
expletive or two, but you could be wrong. There were “status Indians” and
“non-status Indians.” There were Inuit and Métis, and later, the catch-all
term that’s recently gone out of vogue: “Aboriginal.” Although the act
clearly wanted all Indians to assimilate (residential schools were a pretty
big statement on that front), those who dared to reproduce with non-Native
people were also punished. Until 1985, depending on an increasingly
convoluted set of circumstances bound up in imperial sexism, marrying a
non-Native person could mean you and your children were stripped of your
status. If you were a Native man who married a non-Native woman,
congratulations! You, your wife and children were legally entitled to a
laminated card affirming everyone’s Indian status. However, if you were a
Native woman who married a non-Native man, tough luck. Not only were
your kids unable to claim their inherent treaty rights; yours were officially
forfeit. That’s right: Native women were put into the position of having to
choose between their nation, home and identity—and their husband. Pretty
good way to further degrade traditional matrilineality, no?
Meanwhile, politicians trumpeted “multiculturalism” as a defining
Canadian value with straight faces. If you’re starting to feel like this is an
episode of The Twilight Zone as narrated by the Mad Hatter, welcome to the
wild world of Indian politics.
Into this toxic, traumatizing history of colonial dominion over Indigenous
identity comes Atwood’s at worst insensitive, at best ignorant, comments
about Pauline Johnson. What, one wonders, would make Johnson “the real
thing”? Considering the legislation at the time of her birth, odds are that
both she and her mother were technically status Indians. Her father was a
well-known chief in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. She lived on the Six
Nations reserve, had a Mohawk name, and only narrowly avoided being
forced to attend the Mohawk Institute. Would Atwood have deemed
Johnson worthy of “real thing” status if Johnson had attended a residential
school? What about if she danced in the powwow? Didn’t she see any of
those pictures of Johnson in leather, fringe and feathers? What more did she
want?
To paraphrase the title of one of Thomas King’s short films, Johnson was
simply not the Indian Atwood had in mind. King, meanwhile, who has been
quite open about his white mother, regardless of whether Atwood chooses
to acknowledge her existence, doesn’t have the same problem. It’s like a
literary continuation of the Indian Act: favouring men and repressing
women who, apart from their gender, are otherwise in the exact same
circumstances.
For those lucky enough to escape the authenticity test, there are other
ways their writing gets policed. In a review of Eden Robinson’s book Blood
Sports, a book that features non-Native characters, Canadian Literature
reviewer Laurie Kruk writes: “Robinson proudly identifies herself as a
Haisla woman, raised [on a reserve] 500 miles north of Vancouver. She has
been celebrated as an up-and-coming Native Canadian writer, yet it is
interesting that two of her three works have no obvious Native characters or
themes” (italics added). Kruk starts off by identifying Robinson’s heritage
and connection with a specific reserve, perhaps to firmly place her in the
category of “the real thing,” perhaps not. Then, directly after mentioning
Robinson’s being “celebrated as an up-and-coming Native Canadian
writer,” she innocently drops in the word “yet,” implying what she’s about
to say is a contradiction of all that came before. It’s not. Being a celebrated
Native writer in no way conflicts with Robinson writing about non-Native
characters and themes—unless you happen to be a non-Native reviewer
who’s been taught that Native people should exist within the cozy confines
of your colonial imagination. That might, indeed, call for a nicely cloaked
objection, a “yet.” Kruk never explains why, exactly, it’s “interesting” that
not all of Robinson’s writing is based on Native peoples, or why, exactly,
that negates her status as a “Native Canadian writer,” but one can guess. If
only Robinson had written more about powwows.
But what do “real” Native people know about non-Native life, anyway?
That seems to be a genuine point of contention for reviewers of Indigenous
work. In reviewing a staging of Cree writer Tomson Highway’s Rez Sisters,
the first thing Globe and Mail reviewer Ray Conlogue writes is a
comforting assessment of Highway’s “real” Indian status: “Tomson
Highway has long black hair, worn straight and loose. There is no mistaking
that he is a Native person.” So far, so ridiculous. Once Highway’s
Indigeneity is established (to the collective delight of settler Canadians
everywhere), Conlogue goes on to write that Kuna and Rappahannock
actress Gloria Miguel’s “stolid and monumental face lends a comic aspect
to [her character] Pelajia’s longing for Toronto: as if a pre-Columbian stone
carving longed to land on Yonge Street.” The actress’s performance is
comic not because of her timing or talent but because of her “monumental”
face. In case you were naively hoping Conlogue meant “monumental” as in
“great in importance, extent or size,” he immediately clarifies: Miguel
doesn’t remind him of anyone great; she doesn’t even remind him of a
person. She reminds him of a pre-Columbian stone carving. Her face is
“monumental” like an actual monument. Further, isn’t it hilarious to think a
Native person would want to go to Toronto? What would they do there?
There’s no buffalo or sweat lodges! Let’s forget that “Toronto” itself comes
from a Mohawk word and the city was built on stolen Mississauga and
Haudenosaunee land. Let’s also forget that Indigenous people are not
historic artifacts that rumble to life whenever a non-Native person wants a
good chuckle. I’d say we should forget that there are, in fact, buffalo and
sweat lodges in Toronto, but to forget that, non-Native people would have
to know it in the first place.
Even if a Native writer is deemed “the real thing,” writes the appropriate
ratio of Native to non-Native characters and endures belittling “profiles” in
national newspapers, that doesn’t mean they’re left alone. Success and
canonization are afforded only to those who truly deserve them, after all,
and what Native author is worthy? That’s exactly what Jennifer Lee
Covert’s UBC thesis tried to figure out in seventy-nine pages’ worth of
research and inquiry. I wish I were making this up. The thesis, titled “A
Balancing Act: The Canonization of Tomson Highway,” posits that the
plays Highway has written have been canonized not because of their quality
but because they came along at a time when settlers were feeling
particularly guilty about their history with Indigenous peoples—and
because Ojibway playwright Drew Hayden Taylor “has not found as
attractive a balance between Western and native….Instead of blending two
cultural perspectives, [he] supplants white characters and their problems
with native characters and their problems.” There’s another item to add to
the list: Native writers must be careful to strike the right balance between
Western and Native culture. No one wants to see Native peoples’ problems
being explored the same way white people’s problems are. That would
mean Native peoples’ lives are equally worthy of artistic inquiry—which
they clearly are not.
The implied message in Covert’s thesis is that Native success is always
suspect. If non-Native audiences graciously grant acclaim to Indigenous
work, it’s not because the work itself deserves acclaim; it’s because critics
feel bad about that whole genocide business. According to this warped
rationale, Native success becomes pity success, easily explained away as a
fluke instead of recognized as a genuine, deserved achievement. Curiously,
you don’t see Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro or Timothy Findley’s success
and canonization being dissected and dismissed the same way.
Essentially, there’s no way for Native writers to really win. If the
criticisms I’ve looked at here are any indication, as long as Indigenous
writers are “the real thing,” their work features mostly Native characters,
they prey on colonial guilt and blend Western and Native cultures
appropriately, they should be allowed to be successful. But these unfair,
ridiculous standards are literary colonialism in action. These people aren’t
simply casting a critical eye on Native writers’ work; after all, no one is
asking Margaret Atwood to prove her lineage or accusing Alice Munro of
not striking the right balance between Canadian and Scottish cultures. (Did
you even know Munro was of Scottish descent? I certainly didn’t.) The
criticisms lobbied at Native authors are not about style or form or
symbolism; they specifically replicate damaging colonial attitudes that
Native people have faced since contact. There is an insidious undercurrent
driving critics to question a Native author’s identity, written content and
success, directly calling to mind the Indian Act and the continual
dehumanization of living, breathing people into historic artifacts.
These types of reactions aren’t really about Native authors or their work.
They’re about keeping narratives consistent. When these critics look at
Native writers—at Native people—they want to see antiquated stereotypes
staring back at them because that is the fairy tale upon which Canada’s
existence depends. It’s the fairy tale that keeps Canada’s conscience clear:
the fairy tale that allowed former prime minister Stephen Harper to
apologize for residential schools one year, then claim Canada has no history
of colonialism the next, then pull all support for the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, the next, then
say our missing and murdered women weren’t a priority the next, then
weeks later threaten to pull already threadbare funding from band councils
that didn’t abide by strident, unfair financial requirements. All of this
injustice can coexist with non-Native Canadians proudly declaring Canada
the best country in the world precisely because of the existence and
continued maintenance of national fairy tales. Without them, the narrative
of “Canada the good” crumbles, and with it, the identities of so many
Canadians.
With the rise of Reconciliation© Canada, however, a newer, more insidious
twist on this fairy tale has emerged. During the 2015 federal election,
Liberal leader Justin Trudeau attempted to court Indigenous support,
promising to implement all of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s
ninety-four calls to action, including full implementation of UNDRIP. Indeed,
once elected, Trudeau announced that his government would be launching
an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women. They would lift
the 2 percent cap on funding for First Nations education programs. And
Trudeau actually used the words “nation-to-nation relationship” when
discussing his government’s approach to dealing with Indigenous peoples!
Be still, every hot-blooded Indigenous heart! That’s basically the Native
equivalent of finally hearing the commitment-phobic dude-bro you agreed
to “keep it casual” with for twenty years while he messed around with other
girls—even after you bore three of his children and raised them all without
a penny of child support—finally refer to you as his “girlfriend” in public!
Gold stars all around!
Except according to a January 2017 segment of the CBC’s The Current,
“an internal report card from the Privy Council Office has given the
Trudeau government a failing grade for delivering on its promises to
Indigenous Canadians.” Apparently, even though he’s been making
meaningful eye contact with Indigenous leaders all across Canada—he’s
even been gifted with a headdress by the Tsuut’ina Nation—Trudeau has
not implemented UNDRIP. In fact, much like Harper before him, Trudeau has
not required consent from Indigenous nations before approving resource
development on Indigenous lands. In 2016, he approved two contentious
pipelines, Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline and Enbridge’s Line 3,
saying, “We have not been and will not be swayed by political arguments,
be they local, regional or national.” Prior and informed consent? What prior
and informed consent?
Additionally, Trudeau has not forced his government to stop racially
discriminating against 163,000 First Nations children, despite being
mandated to by the Supreme Court of Canada. When Saskatoon Tribal
Council Chief Felix Thomas asked Trudeau why so little of promised
federal funds have actually made it to Indigenous communities, Trudeau
used some classic misdirection to turn the question around on the chiefs,
saying he could tell none of these chiefs actually talked to their own youth
to get their opinions. Luckily, Trudeau was there to give precious insight
into what Indigenous youth really want: “a place to store their canoes and
paddles so they can connect back out on the land.” According to the prime
minister, they don’t want fair and equal funding, nor clean drinking water,
nor investment in mental health services, nor the right to live with their
families without fear of being targeted for abduction by social services.
They don’t even want their language back. They just want a few sheds.
Indian-youth-whisperer Trudeau didn’t explain why his government wasn’t
meeting such a modest but important request. I’m sure our young people’s
rightful canoe storage is just caught up in a bit of bureaucratic red tape, just
like all our other rights.
Is Trudeau critically interrogating Canada’s national ideas of Indigenous
peoples? Is he honestly examining Canada’s historic relationship with
Indigenous nations so he can forge a different, respectful path forward?
Though his crafty pro-Indigenous PR makes his policies appear different
from those of his predecessor, if the effects are ultimately the same, how
different are they? Throwing glitter on the same old fairy tale doesn’t
suddenly make it new.
The problem with continuing these national fairy tales is they’re flimsy
and false, furthering the chasm between those who hold an idealized vision
of Canada and those who see and acknowledge the hidden, darker side. It’s
only by putting away such childish fairy tales and looking at our less than
magical reality that Canada can really mature as a nation and engage in
open, honest discussion about its ongoing treatment of Native peoples.
Apologizing for residential schools is not enough; an inquiry into missing
and murdered Indigenous women is not enough. True reconciliation with
Native peoples requires Canada to stop its paternalistic, discriminatory
policies and, most important, stop interfering with our sovereignty over our
identities, communities and lands. These are by no means easy or
comfortable actions for Canadians to undertake, but they must be
undertaken regardless. Anything else is simply not “the real thing.”
So where does that leave an Indigenous writer like me right now: a half-
white, half-Tuscarora woman who writes about whatever she pleases and
has, mournfully, never danced in a powwow? There are already three strikes
against me, yet there’s still this persistent belief that I’m somehow at an
advantage because I’m a Native writer. Richard Wagamese best summed up
my feelings on this idea: “I’m not a native writer. I’m a fucking writer….I
don’t want to be compared, I don’t want to be ghettoized, I don’t want to be
marginalized….I just want [people] to read my work and go, ‘Wow.’ ”
Don’t misunderstand me. My hesitation to be labelled a “Native writer”
isn’t a hesitation to be labelled such by other Native people. That is a point
of pride, a sign of kinship and solidarity. Being labelled a “Native writer”
by non-Native people, however, is more often than not an act of literary
colonialism, showing paternalism, ownership and a desire to keep us inside
a neatly labelled box where they deem us a non-threat. A continuation of
the fairy tale.
While certain non-Native readers, writers and critics continue to bemoan
our refusal to be the Indian they’re looking for, others are willing to see us
as ourselves. To acknowledge not only our talents but the historical
landmines we’ve had to sidestep on our way towards each milestone. To
appreciate our successes instead of regarding them with suspicion. To
refuse literary colonialism and the way it desensitizes them as well.
In the meantime, I’m proud to say I’m no one’s Noble Savage and I’ll
continue to write what I please. Though maybe I will learn how to powwow
dance—alone, in the privacy of my living room. It looks like good cardio.
SONTAG, IN SNAPSHOTS
Reflecting on “In Plato’s Cave” in 2018
“In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our
notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.
They are…an ethics of seeing.”
—Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave”
I started to dodge cameras around the age of ten. Photos, I thought, were
reserved for preserving images of the beautiful. I was not beautiful. I was
ugly, and therefore not worth being immortalized on film or—more recently
—in digital images. Any time I saw myself in a photo at one specific
moment, at one specific angle, I felt sick. Why did they take that picture?
I’d wonder. Who would want to look at an ugly girl like me? I didn’t even
want to look at me.
Despite my tendency to avoid pictures, when I was eighteen I realized the
more I tried to avoid being photographed, the more people tried to
photograph me. It was like a game to them. It didn’t matter that I didn’t like
being photographed. It didn’t matter that they were my friends. They were
going to get a picture of me. They were going to prove to me that getting
my picture taken wasn’t so bad. These people would eventually get their
picture, but they never proved anything to me about photos. All they proved
to me was that their desire to have an image of me was more important to
them than what I wanted. This was their ethics of seeing me. I had no power
over it.
I stopped resisting photos after that. I wouldn’t pose, I wouldn’t smile.
I’d make an intentionally ugly face in a half-hearted attempt to get the jump
on people who might criticize my unintentionally ugly face. I’d make an
intentionally ugly face to stop myself from criticizing what I thought of as
my unintentionally ugly face.
“[Photographs] give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our
heads….To collect photographs is to collect the world.”
The idea of “owning” the world is hardly new. In fact, the desire to own or
collect the world is behind the colonialism that has overtaken every corner
of this planet. Photography itself has had an interesting role in colonialism,
one that can be traced back to famous painter George Catlin. The story goes
that in 1805, when he was nine, Catlin encountered an Oneida man from the
Haudenosaunee Confederacy. This man didn’t kill, kidnap or harm Catlin,
which were all things that “savage Indians” were apparently supposed to do
back then. The man simply raised his hand in acknowledgement.
This act was enough to shatter the stereotype Catlin had grown up
believing. Unfortunately, Catlin took that knowledge and invested his
energies into memorializing another stereotype: that of the vanishing
Indian. Catlin believed that it was inevitable that Indigenous peoples would
die out—either from illnesses like smallpox or from war. Instead of
petitioning his government to stop slaughtering us, though, Catlin resigned
himself to our extinction and took it upon himself to preserve “the looks
and customs of the vanishing races of native man in America.” He even
wrote, “Nothing short of the loss of my life, shall prevent me from visiting
their country, and of becoming their historian.” Not even Indigenous
peoples’ consent, it would seem.
Despite his presumably friendly intentions, Catlin painted without
knowing what ceremonies he was observing or concerning himself with
how those he painted felt about his work. The paintings he created were his
truth, but they were presented as if they were the truth.
A little over a hundred years after Catlin’s life-changing encounter with a
Haudenosaunee man, Edward S. Curtis published the first volume in his
The North American Indian project. Like Catlin before him, Curtis travelled
to different Indigenous nations for his project—but unlike Catlin, Curtis
used photography to capture his versions of “an Indian character…[at]
some vital phase in his existence.” Curtis produced thousands of photos and
twenty volumes of those photos. But when I look at those photos, I don’t
see the person the way I think they want to be seen. I see them the way
Curtis wanted them to be seen: frozen in time, relics of the past, beautifully
tragic vanishing Indians.
The (white, often male) idea that preserving Indigenous peoples’ images
is somehow more important than us preserving our own traditions and lives
is just as intoxicating for non-Indigenous people today as it was in Catlin’s
day. In 2013, British photographer Jimmy Nelson published his series
“Before They Pass Away,” which—you guessed it—is another attempt by a
white man to deem himself the official historian of nations he does not
know, and to preserve specific, staged images of the people within them.
Writer and photographer Teju Cole writes that Nelson “is sentimental about
those he photographs and often proclaims their beauty, but having invested
himself so deeply in the idea of their ‘disappearance,’ he is unable to
believe that they are not going anywhere, that they are simply adapting to
the modern world.” How many non-Indigenous people are just as deeply
invested as Nelson and Curtis and Catlin in the idea that we are vanishing
Indians? How many have looked at these men’s images of us, thought that
we were beautiful, bought photos or paintings of us, collected those images,
but never once spoken to any of us in person? Never once considered what
our lives today are like, or how they personally contribute to our ongoing
dispossession and disappearance?
This “beauty” of ours that they claim to admire rarely translates to their
seeing us in our fullness—as unique, sovereign peoples who deserve the
right to control our own destinies. It does nothing to advance our rights or
interests because, quite simply, these people don’t see human beings. They
see an ideology, an aesthetic; a story that reinforces their self-proclaimed
right to occupy Indigenous lands without making them feel bad for how
they got that “right.” If they were to see us as anything more than an
aesthetic, they would have to acknowledge their own complicity in
upholding the exact systems that have been trying to disappear us for
centuries.
In 2015 I was at a writing residency for emerging Indigenous writers at a
national arts institution. When they were looking to photograph a few of the
participants to feature on their website, I knew they wouldn’t choose me. I
didn’t look like the vanishing Indians Nelson, Curtis and Catlin loved so
much. I didn’t look Indian© at all. Sure enough, they picked writers with
long black hair and high cheekbones and beautiful, tawny skin. They knew
exactly what they were looking for to get the visual diversity points they so
clearly craved. The writers they chose didn’t have their traditional regalia
with them for the pictures, but I can only imagine the boundless enthusiasm
the literary officer of the program would have had if they did. They could
have collected their perfect Indian© image to add to their collection, an
image they knew to look for because of Nelson, Curtis and Catlin.
“Photographs furnish evidence….The camera record incriminates.”
When Black Lives Matter started mobilizing around police violence against
Black people in the wake of the murders of Eric Garner and Michael
Brown, many people thought that the solution was body cameras. If
photographs furnish evidence, went their logic, surely camera footage could
furnish all the evidence needed to prove, or disprove, charges of racist
police violence. Of course many Black people, Indigenous people and
people of colour suspected that this wouldn’t be the case, but white people
—people who had never had reason to fear police—were adamant.
There are instances where anti-Black police violence caught on film has
been used as evidence. Twenty-seven-year-old Philip Alafe was taken into
the Brantford police station on July 3, 2015, after an arrest. He told the
booking officer he had depression and anxiety, though he wasn’t suicidal,
and that he had sickle cell anemia, thus requiring regular medication to help
alleviate his ongoing pain. Alafe is, it’s important to note, a Black man.
Staff Sergeant Cheney Venn, a white police officer, came on duty at
10:30 p.m. (I feel obliged to disclose that Venn was the police officer at my
high school when I went there from 2002 until 2006, though I never
interacted with him personally.) Alafe, hoping for more medication, began
throwing wet toilet paper at the camera around 11 p.m. to get the attention
of the officers on duty. Venn yelled at him to stop. When Alafe wouldn’t
stop, Venn removed Alafe’s mattress and blanket from his cell, telling him
he’d get them back when he behaved. He gave Alafe one pill, though Alafe
was allowed up to three if needed. Still in pain, and wanting his mattress
and blanket back, Alafe tied his jumpsuit and shirt to the bars of his cell
over the next few hours. Venn came back twice and told him not to do that.
He didn’t return his mattress or blanket.
At 3 a.m., Venn came back to Alafe’s cell and punched him three times,
then he took his jumpsuit and all other clothing from him except for his
socks, leaving him naked and cold in his cell. (Alafe’s doctor has described
his pain as “unbearable”—and, unfortunately, made even worse by cold,
dehydration and stress.) Meanwhile, Venn, who admitted in court he hadn’t
tried to determine what Alafe’s medical conditions were, decided Alafe did
not need medical attention or more medication. He thought Alafe’s claiming
to have a chronic condition was simply an attempt “to get out of the cells in
order to go to a more comfortable setting.”
After Alafe spent three hours in pain, shivering naked on the floor, his
depression got the better of him and he tried to fashion a noose out of his
socks. It took two minutes for Venn to stop Alafe’s suicide attempt, after
which he took his socks and still refused to get him medical attention.
At 7:30 a.m., when a new officer took over from Venn, he returned
Alafe’s jumpsuit and, shortly after, his mattress and blanket. Unsurprisingly,
once Alafe finally had clothes, a blanket and a mattress, he fell asleep.
The reason I can relay all of this in detail—and the reason Ontario Court
Justice Ken Lenz stayed the charges against Alafe, finding Alafe’s rights
were violated under sections 7 and 12 of the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms—is because the incident was caught on camera. Justice Lenz
admitted that without the cell videos he probably would have believed
Officer Venn’s version of events. He needed proof. He needed the camera
record.
And yet even though Lenz thoroughly rebuked Venn’s behaviour, calling
it “degrading to human dignity,” and claimed that Alafe’s perception that he
could no longer trust police was “a perception I’m beginning to share,”
Venn, his abuser, remained on regular duty as a police officer. Brantford
police chief Geoffrey Nelson has said there is an ongoing investigation into
“potential professional misconduct,” but there is no guarantee that Venn’s
abusing a Black, disabled man will cost him his job, or even lead to a few
weeks of paid leave. After all, the officers who killed Eric Garner on
camera were not indicted. The officer who shot Philando Castile while his
girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, live-streamed the encounter to Facebook
was not indicted. The officer who shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice on
camera was not indicted. So few of the white police officers who beat or
kill Black people are ever indicted, or even punished.
The systems responsible for creating an environment where Officer Venn
could abuse Alafe without worrying about the consequences, the systems
that created Alafe’s story in the first place, continue—unchanged and
unchecked. No matter how incriminating certain photos may be, and no
matter how much people who have never experienced anti-Black racism
claim otherwise, there is no photographic record that can change these
systems. Not on its own.
“In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to
another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.”
The agency of photographers and lack of agency of their subjects often gets
overlooked, mainly because photographs are usually seen as facts rather
than crafted images. It’s assumed that photography, and therefore
photographers, are passive, merely showing the world as it is. Sontag refers
to the passive nature of photography as “its aggression,” arguing that even
idealizing subjects or making a “virtue of [their] plainness” is an aggressive
act. The popularity of certain types of photographs of poor folk, racialized
folk, disabled folk and so on would seem to argue against the charge of
aggression—at first. I’m thinking of the work of people like Diane Arbus,
who photographed “freaks,” or Jacob Riis, who photographed the poor, or
Adam Clark Vroman, who photographed Indigenous people, or perhaps
even Robert Mapplethorpe, who photographed naked Black men for his
Black Book. Aren’t these photographs trying to educate those of us who
don’t have access to those people, those spaces? Aren’t they trying to
encourage understanding, education, empathy?
Perhaps. But how can understanding, education or empathy exist when
all you have is the photograph? When you have no context to educate you
on what, exactly, you’re seeing and what, exactly, it means? Without that,
viewers must rely on their own assumptions and their own often limited
knowledge. If you’re looking at a photo in National Geographic, for
instance, and you see an “exotic” African man from an unspecified tribe,
you have the illusion of being educated. You now know that that person,
that way of living, exists. But you don’t know what his clothing or tattoos
or facial piercings mean to him or his people, what his people have
survived, what they care about or who they are. You know only what that
person looked like at that exact second, in that exact light.
So how, then, is the photo operating? Is it telling you what that man
wants you to know, or is it allowing you to act as a voyeur, smuggling you
into his space without his consent—a space you wouldn’t otherwise have
access to? Is it giving you the option of looking at this man from a “safe
distance,” maybe curled up on your couch, or sitting in the waiting room of
your dental office, all the while not giving the man you’re looking at the
opportunity to speak back to you or correct your assumptions about him?
This may be why, in March 2018, National Geographic‘s newest editor-
in-chief, Susan Goldberg, penned an editorial about the magazine’s
historical depiction of race. I could go into detail about Goldberg’s
arguments and examples, but the title really says it all: “For Decades, Our
Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.”
The most telling part of the article was when John Edwin Mason, who
teaches the history of photography at the University of Virginia, pointed out
that National Geographic came “into existence at the height of colonialism,
[when] the world was divided into the colonizers and the colonized.”
Mason argued that the magazine didn’t teach so much as reinforce ideas
readers already had, while giving them photographic “proof” that these
racist ideas were, in fact, correct. This has always been the danger of not
taking into consideration who the photographer is and what standards they
are trying to impose.
This is also why there seems to be such a stark contrast between the types
of photos taken by photographers who have no understanding of who or
what they’re photographing and photos taken by photographers who do.
Anishinaabe/Ojibway photographer Nadya Kwandibens, from the
Animakee Wa Zhing First Nation, asks, in her series “Concrete Indians,”
“Who are you as a Native person living in the city?” Kwandibens contrasts
her subjects—Indigenous people wearing their traditional regalia or
“modern” clothes or some combination of the two—with the heavily urban,
concrete spaces around them. If that juxtaposition feels unusual or wrong to
you, her photos seem to say, that’s not our problem. That’s your problem.
Do you think Indigenous people are relics? That they don’t belong in cities?
Do you think they should only be wearing “modern” clothing in these
spaces? Do you think they should just assimilate already?
2Spirit/Queer Métis/Saulteaux/Polish visual artist Dayna Danger uses
BDSM, beaded fetish masks and the strategic placement of antlers in huge-
scale photos that, in Danger’s own words, question “the line between
empowerment and objectification” and explore “the complicated dynamics
of sexuality, gender, and power in a consensual and feminist manner.” Her
photos demand your attention, demand you to look in the eyes of the Black
or Indigenous woman you might otherwise dismiss or demean and see the
power of choice. She is choosing to show you her body, to show you her
desire, to look you in the eye, to not be ashamed. That is the pinnacle of
decolonization: an empowered, unashamed Black woman beside an
empowered, unashamed Indigenous woman.
British artist Alison Lapper, who was born without arms and with
shortened legs, a condition called phocomelia, turns her photographic eye
on herself, interrogating ideas of beauty and physical normality in pictures
that are sometimes bold and sexy, sometimes soft and sensual. The very
idea that a disabled woman is worthy of the sort of love and attention art
requires is radical; the idea that she can make that art herself is
revolutionary. Lapper’s work questions the notion that disabled people are
objects to pity or use for inspiration. Instead of seeing them as “sad” or
“inspirational,” see them as sexual, see them as beautiful, see them as
human.
There are many photographers who have used cameras to craft images of
their own communities on their own terms. These photographers are
intimately aware of how the wrong people imposing the wrong standards
can push harmful narratives about their communities—narratives that can
result in real-life negative repercussions for their family and friends. These
photographers have a stake in accurately representing their communities, so
with every photograph they take, they’re aware of the responsibility they
carry. After all, if they do a bad job portraying their own communities,
they’ll have to clean up the mess, too.
However, when a person enters another community as a tourist, bringing
their own set of unexamined, perhaps problematic assumptions with them,
they’re not necessarily going to be held accountable for how their
photographs uphold those assumptions. No matter how long they’re in that
space taking pictures, they’re going to leave when they’re done. They don’t
have to look any of their subjects in the eye and explain to them why they
removed certain things from the image and added others. They don’t have
to deal with any negative repercussions that could arise as a result of their
inaccuracies. The most they have to confront is the possibility that their
photographic subjects will later contact them and express discontent with
their work. Since it’s still ultimately the photographer’s choice whether to
listen to the critique and make changes, that’s not exactly a heavy burden to
bear.
I don’t believe you necessarily have to be part of a community to take
their concerns about representation seriously. Aaron Huey is a white
photographer living in Seattle. When he went to photograph the Oglala
Lakota tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota back in 2005,
he was looking to photograph poverty in America. That was the standard he
was imposing on his subjects. It didn’t take long for him to realize the flaw
with his approach. “People there were telling me the most epic stories I’d
ever heard,” Huey told Slate, “and people were talking about a history of
genocide. I knew that word would never be used in the mainstream press. I
knew right away I wasn’t OK with that, that I wanted a bigger piece of the
truth than just more statistics and more pictures of poverty.”
Huey spent four years at Pine Ridge, becoming part of the community,
falling in love with the families that invited him in. Even though what he
saw on that reserve was “the saddest and scariest thing I’d seen on the face
of the Earth,” he knew that “objective” journalism wasn’t the right way to
approach this. He had to learn the history of oppression he represented as a
white man, as well as protocols for ceremonies he didn’t understand. For
example, he learned he was allowed to photograph before and after
ceremonies, but not during. The Lakota people themselves also challenged
his intentions: according to a Time article, “When they thought he wasn’t
capturing the reality of it all, they’d say: ‘Why are you doing this?’ He
would ask himself ‘Why am I doing this?’ and recalibrate.” It took every
one of those four years before he felt he had “learned how to hear [the
Lakota people],” and moved from a passive observer to an actual advocate,
collaborating on street art projects, storytelling projects, non-profit work
that funds Indigenous artists, and a cover story with none other than
National Geographic.
When Huey published Mitakuye Oyasin, a book of his photography of
Pine Ridge, he had spent over seven years there. He described the book as
“more like a prayer or a poem than a documentary. It was like a ceremony,
and I didn’t realize it until the end.” Through his experience with the Lakota
people, Huey realized how unsatisfying it was acting as an “impartial
witness” to the events he was photographing, and subsequently changed his
entire approach to photography. In order to understand and honour his
responsibility to the Lakota community, Huey had to acknowledge and take
accountability for the shallow standards he wanted to impose, and choose to
impose entirely different ones instead.
When you look at the photos of Nadya Kwandibens, Dayna Danger,
Alison Lapper and Aaron Huey, you can feel the respect that has shaped
each frame. It’s a completely different viewing experience. Each
photographer respected and understood the communities they were
photographing before they snapped their shutter closed. They knew their
photos bore a responsibility, so their work was created with more care and
intention than if they worked under the rather colonial assumption that they
had the “right” to photograph whatever they wanted, however they wanted.
The bare minimum standard we should expect photographers to impose on
their subjects is respect.
“From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible
number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope.”
The magnitude of photography, the way it aims to capture everything, does
indeed seem to have an imperial scope. It’s even more pervasive now than
when Sontag wrote her book. Technology has absolutely infiltrated our
lives with cameras, allowing us every opportunity to take thousands of
pictures of ourselves and others whenever the desire strikes. Sontag claimed
back in 1973 that photography’s popularity meant it was “not practiced by
most people as art,” but one has only to look at the popularity of Instagram,
photo-editing apps and cell phones with high-quality cameras to see that
this assertion holds little weight today. People not only want to take pictures
of their everyday lives; they want to craft and manipulate them until they
look like they were taken by professionals.
The term “selfie” was coined by an Australian man in 2002, yet perhaps
unsurprisingly the cultural stigma surrounding selfies seems proportional to
how popular they are with women. It’s an interesting bit of bullshit: Women
can be the subject of millions of paintings hung in galleries, often painted
by men. Women can be in varying states of undress in photos used for
advertisements, often photographed by men. Women can appear in films,
TV shows, fashion spreads, porn—often shot, directed and edited by men.
Women’s bodies can be posed and prodded and digitally manipulated until
they look nothing like the real women who stood in front of the camera.
That’s all fine. But if a woman puts on makeup, takes a picture of herself,
for herself, adds a filter or two and posts it on Instagram, men comment that
this is why you can’t trust women, that women are engaging in “false
advertising,” that all men should take women swimming on the first date to
see how they really look under all the makeup and photoshop.
Of course, it’s not just men who hate women who post selfies. I used to
be a selfie-hater, too. I would scroll through social media, resentment and
indignation welling in my chest as picture after picture of smiling women or
sexy women or serious women or goofy women came up on my screen. I
was always the most annoyed at women who were trying to look sexy or
beautiful in their selfies. What narcissists, I thought, choking down my own
insecurity.
It was only when I decided I didn’t have to see myself as ugly that I
actively interrogated this impulse. Why was I tearing down these women—
many of whom were my coworkers, my acquaintances, my friends? What
was so wrong with them feeling good about the way they looked? For
exerting control over their own image in a world that insisted control should
never belong to them? For getting validation that they were, in the words of
Rachel Syme, “worthy of being seen”?
I started taking photos of myself. It did make me feel beautiful. It did
make me see myself as worthy of being seen. But I still wouldn’t share my
selfies with anyone else.
In her brilliant essay “Selfie: The Revolutionary Potential of Your Own
Face, in Seven Chapters,” Rachel Syme defines a selfie as having to be
shared in order to be considered a selfie. I balked at this initially. Weren’t
my selfies selfies? Why did I have to share pictures of myself when I was
taking them solely for my own satisfaction?
Then I remembered the shame, the ugliness that I felt back when I was a
kid who refused to have my picture taken. How I was convinced no one
would want to see a picture of me. How I hated seeing pictures of myself.
Even though I was almost two decades older and had embarked on a project
to see myself as beautiful, very little had changed. I still thought keeping
pictures of myself from others was, in a sense, sparing them.
If photography has a scope we could call “imperial,” what would we call
the scope of something as ingrained and unavoidable as shame? Perhaps we
should also call it “imperial.” After all, haven’t the Western, white-centric
beauty standards that have made us feel inadequate and shameful in the first
place been spread through imperialism? Though Britain can no longer claim
most of the world as its empire, the colonialism it introduced—the beauty
standards it introduced—linger. Skin-lightening creams are enthusiastically
bought and sold on every single continent to those who don’t have the
“right” (read: white) skin tone. A painful, hours-long process exists for
Black women to chemically straighten their hair so it looks more
“professional” (read: white). Plastic surgeries are available to change the
eyelids of East Asian women from monolids to “beautiful” (read: Western,
white) eyelids. Even among white women there are standards to be upheld:
large breasts, no cellulite, thin waists, straight teeth, clear skin, bleached
assholes.
These standards didn’t appear out of thin air. Someone, somewhere
decided that they would hire a Black actress with Eurocentric features and
light skin over a Black actress with wide hips and dark skin. And then
another someone, somewhere did the same. And another, and another, and
another. This has happened ad nauseam across every other possible
category one can think of: race, gender, age, sexuality, body size, physical
ability. This is how beauty becomes an imperial project: those who are
considered “beautiful” according to these standards are also considered
inherently more valuable than those who aren’t. When a thin, pretty white
girl like JonBenét Ramsey is found dead, it ignites fury and indignation that
spans decades, still important enough to warrant cover stories in 2018
tabloids. When a gorgeous, award-nominated Indigenous actress just
breaking it big in Hollywood named Misty Upham goes missing, the local
police don’t even look for her. Her family have to organize the search party
themselves, eventually finding her body ten days after they file the missing
person report. In a world where beauty equals worth, not being the right
kind of beautiful has material consequences on the quality of your life—and
your death.
That’s what’s so revolutionary about the rise of platforms like YouTube,
Twitter and Instagram: the old gatekeepers are becoming obsolete. The only
person that can decide who deserves to be seen and valued now is the
person who is uploading content. This means that communities that were
once considered below appealing to are visible in a way they never were
before, which also means they can make their interests known in ways they
never could before. And this increased visibility seems to be working.
Rihanna’s beauty line Fenty Beauty launched in 2017 with a nearly
unheard-of forty foundation shades, then proceeded to sell out of many of
the darkest shades for months, sending an immediate message to the rest of
the beauty industry: appeal to all skin tones—value all skin tones—or get
left behind. Black Panther, which was written and directed by Ryan
Coogler, a Black man, and featured an almost entirely Black cast, took in a
box office total of $242.1 million on opening weekend, then sustained its
success to become the third film in history to pass the $700-million mark in
the U.S. This went against everything film executives claimed about the
drawing power of Black directors and Black stars. It was no surprise to
Black people, though, as they’d been anticipating the film for months,
sharing photos and memes on Twitter and Instagram of themselves getting
ready to see the film opening night. Conversely, the social media reaction to
Hollywood films that have whitewashed characters of colour—casting
Scarlett Johansson as a Japanese woman in The Ghost in the Shell, Emma
Stone as a Hawaiian and Asian woman in Aloha, and Christian Bale as an
Egyptian prince in Exodus, for example—coincided with poor domestic
box-office performances. It would seem, then, that since social media is
controlled by everyday people, allowing diverse viewpoints and
representations to have a platform every second of every day, people no
longer have to accept the discrimination of mainstream media and big
industry.
It’s important to remember that appealing to capitalism to fix the
problems of racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, transphobia and homophobia
is problematic in its own way. Capitalism always relies upon exploitation to
create profit, and therefore it must always rely upon differing valuations of
people’s humanity. Still, every time I click on a #Native hashtag and see
pride reflected back instead of shame, I know that we have a good start.
I recently came across a passage in Leo Tolstoy’s essay “What Is Art?”:
Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some
mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical
physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up
energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is
not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure;
but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same
feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of
individuals and of humanity.
Selfies do that. Each person who posts a photo of themself online pushes
back against imperial beauty standards and profit-driven gatekeepers,
joining online communities that are built on our mutual understandings of
how shame has impacted us. If posting selfies online means that we
temporarily feel good about ourselves in a society that requires us to feel
bad to make money; if it encourages us to refuse the idea that we need to
change ourselves to fit impossible moulds, isn’t that indispensable for our
progress? Isn’t it indispensable for our collective well-being?
“Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of
itself—a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.”
Photographs are a family-building exercise. Sontag notes that children who
are well photographed are assumed to be well loved. This is probably why
my sister is still indignant that our parents took so few photos of her as a
baby.
Recently, though, when going through a grey grocery bag of photographs
my father’s new wife salvaged from our old trailer, I saw a picture I’d never
seen before—one that I didn’t know existed, of a person I’d only learned
existed the year before. The photo showed my mother holding a strange
baby and smiling. Her smile wouldn’t last. That strange baby was my half-
sister, whom Mom had named Angelica. Soon after this picture was taken
that baby would be pulled from her arms and carried away by adoption
agents. My mother would never hold her again. She didn’t want to be
giving up Angelica. She was already a single mother of two when she had
her, and she knew she couldn’t care for Linnie, her first child, who had
cerebral palsy and used a wheelchair, while also mothering both Teena and
a newborn. She had to make a choice. She chose to give up her new baby.
My family had thick photo albums, full of relatives I’d known my whole
life, sprinkled with others I’d never met. We had hundreds of photos of our
family smiling and laughing, still nestled inside the flimsy envelopes the
one-hour-photo gave us. These were the moments my parents chose to
memorialize. This was the family my parents chose to memorialize. By
keeping that photo of Angelica from us, my parents denied us memories.
They denied us family. Our kit of images bore witness not only to our
connectedness but also to our disconnectedness.
“As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is
unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are
insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most
characteristic of modern activities: tourism.”
Every tourist has taken pictures of the places they’ve travelled. I remember
taking my camera to Niagara Falls for a trip with my husband and kid. All I
wanted was to take pictures of them in this different space, candidly
enjoying one another’s company. I couldn’t, because my kid was trained
from infancy to pose for a camera and they’ve perfected posing to a fine art,
but still. I need to remember this, I told myself, and memory is unreliable,
so I need photos. It worked. I have those photos to bring myself back to
specific points in time and space. There we are in one photo, our clothes
protected by translucent, bright blue ponchos, our ponchos covered with
water drops that shimmer in the sun as we stand on the Maid of the Mist’s
lower deck. There’s the Horseshoe Falls, where Lelawala, the Seneca
woman considered the original Maid of the Mist, was saved by the god of
thunder, then went on to save her village from a giant snake. There are all
the other blue-clad families scrambling to get the perfect photo of the
perfect falls. We’re all trying to take home a piece of this natural beauty,
even if it’s just a picture.
I didn’t take pictures of the homeless people panhandling. I didn’t take
pictures of the throngs of people, each street so full I was terrified my kid
would get lost in the crowd, causing me to clutch their hand tighter. I didn’t
take pictures of the impoverished area surrounding the Greyhound bus
terminal, which looked completely abandoned. I didn’t take pictures of the
cheap motel we were staying in. I was using photos to curate my ideal
space, my ideal way of remembering this trip. Sontag refers to this use of
photography as “a way of refusing [experience]—by limiting experience to
a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a
souvenir.” In other words, photography and tourism work in tandem to
make natural beauty a commodity, an experience that in a very real sense
must be purchased to be enjoyed, then converted into a product, a photo.
So many people simply have no idea how to appreciate natural beauty
without turning it into a picture. I felt this acutely the last time I was in
Banff, Alberta. Banff National Park is the oldest national park in Canada—
and it just so happens to be situated on Treaty 7 territory, the traditional
homelands of the Stoney Nakoda, Blackfoot and Tsuut’ina Nations. I finally
understood what the word “sublime” meant when I beheld its mountains,
forests and lakes for the first time.
Realistically, the Rocky Mountains are stunning not only from the
vantage point of Banff. They’re stunning everywhere. But just like with
Niagara Falls, capitalism has tied itself to the natural beauty of Banff
National Park, giving them reason to remain beautiful. Because this space
can be turned into profit—people will pay for entry to the park, hotel rooms
in Banff, food and drink along the strip—the space is taken care of so that
people will want to take pictures. After all, what else can they do with the
space? It’s not like most of the people who come put down tobacco at the
water’s edge, or give thanks to every element of creation within the space,
the way we Haudenosaunee do with our Thanksgiving address.
None of the camera-clutching tourists seemed to wonder why this part of
the Rocky Mountains is considered worth protecting while another part of
the same mountain range, in B.C., as well as the Columbia Mountains and
the Coast Mountains, which are all just as stunning, are currently being
plundered to make room for the Kinder Morgan pipeline. None of them
seem to find it unusual that they’re allowed, even encouraged, to preserve
the memory of the mountains with photographs, while those fighting to
preserve the actual mountains for future generations are arrested and jailed.
Now that the government of Canada has purchased the Kinder Morgan
pipeline with $4.5 billion of taxpayers’ money without consulting
Canadians, the completion of this pipeline is a national project. The
government can officially use whatever means necessary to ensure that
these beautiful mountains are destroyed, the picturesque water around them
is polluted, and the oil of a dying industry gets to wherever they want it to
go.
In this age, the natural world is spared only if it can be photographed; if
its beauty can be sold; if it doesn’t get in the way of more pipelines and
more profit.
“Like sexual voyeurism, [photographing] is a way of at least tacitly, often
explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep happening. To take a
picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo
remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a ‘good’
picture)…including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain or
misfortune.”
I took a photography course in high school. One of the assignments was a
portrait series. All photos were supposed to be of the same person, but in
different settings and perspectives. I chose my five-year-old brother,
Dakota, for my subject. I followed him around with a camera I borrowed
from school—down our long gravel driveway after checking the mail; near
the creek by our house, where Dakota liked to go to think; into the dense
woods on our family property. All of that was fine. None of it seemed
exploitative.
But then Dakota got into a fight with one of our brothers and started to
cry. I wanted to comfort him, but I also still needed to get a close-up photo
of him, and the focused lighting of the lamp in my room would be perfect. I
told Dakota to come to my room, let him lie on my pillow, adjusted the
lamp and took picture after picture of his puffy, red face, adjusting the
aperture between his sobs. Part of me wondered what he was feeling. He
was crying, and his older sister, who was usually the first to console him
after our mother, was taking pictures of him crying instead of soothing him.
Did he feel he needed to keep crying for the sake of the pictures? Was he
hurt that I seemed to care more about getting the perfect photo of him
crying than him actually crying? I never asked, he never said. The same
way I never asked myself why I could so easily turn off my concern for my
own brother for the sake of “art.”
The morality of and rationale for this type of photography—that is,
photography featuring people in pain—becomes more fraught when these
photos aren’t meant to be art at all. In 2004, CBS published photos that
members of the U.S. Army and CIA had taken of themselves committing
human rights abuses against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq the
year before. The photos appeared everywhere, featuring disgusting,
unspeakable acts of torture and abuse against Middle Eastern men. I was
disgusted, but I wasn’t surprised. War crimes are common, and the
dehumanization of Middle Eastern people started well before 9/11.
I do, however, question why the soldiers took pictures of the torture and
abuse they were committing. Unlike with the Vietnam War, which Sontag
references in her essay, the photographers of the torture at Abu Ghraib
weren’t war photographers. They were the soldiers themselves, often using
personal cell phone cameras. What’s more, these soldiers were not only
choosing to abuse these men; they were also choosing to document their
abuse of these men, and therefore furnish the very evidence that would
eventually be used against them in disciplinary procedures. But to what
ends? One can hardly imagine any person looking back fondly at these
photos.
Sontag writes, “There is something predatory in the act of taking a
picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they
never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have.”
Perhaps photography gave these American soldiers an additional layer of
power over their Iraqi prisoners: the power to turn the prisoners’ pain and
humiliation into images without their consent, to forever “capture” them the
way the soldiers saw them—as terrorists, as less than human.
Of course, that doesn’t explain the presence of the American soldiers in
the pictures, posing in photo after photo alongside the men they tortured.
Which came first: the camera or the abuse? Did the camera’s presence
encourage the abuse to keep happening? Did the American soldiers in a
sense “perform” their violence for the camera, attempting to stage the
perfect pictures of torture? How would the abuse have changed if there was
no camera? Or would it have changed at all?
It’s somewhat frightening to think about the camera as intermediary. How
much does the camera’s physical presence between the soldiers (the
photographers) and the prisoners (the photographed) create the type of
distance necessary for the soldiers to still pretend they’re good people? As
if the very act of taking a photo—of viewing real life through a lens—
somehow made whatever you were taking a picture of less real, less worthy
of intervention or concern.
Maybe this is a version of what happened when I photographed my
crying brother. Maybe there is no way to ethically photograph pain.
“Photographs can abet desire in the most direct, utilitarian way—as when
someone collects photographs of anonymous examples of the desirable as
an aid to masturbation….Desire has no history—at least, it is experienced in
each instance as all foreground, immediacy.”
First things first: desire definitely has a history. Its history is intertwined
with beauty standards that reinforce systemic oppressions—colonialism,
sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia—as well as being
intertwined with rape culture, or, if you prefer, a culture of non-consent.
The desire of cisgendered, heterosexual white men has not only been
historically used to evaluate the worth of women, two-spirit people and
non-binary folks; it has also been continually wielded as a weapon against
us, targeting our respective bodies with sexual and physical violence, as
well as murder and genocide. The idea that desire’s “immediacy” somehow
removes it from this specific, painful history is absurd. In fact, it is that very
immediacy that often excuses violence against us, playing into the rhetoric
that a violent man simply “couldn’t help himself” or “got caught up in the
moment.”
It is with this history in mind that we should examine the rise in revenge
porn and celebrity nude pic leaks, which I consider two sides of the same
coin. Revenge porn is exactly what it sounds like: a man encourages a
woman he’s seeing to send him nude pictures of herself. She complies.
When they break up, the man posts her nudes all over the internet without
her consent.
The thing is, not all revenge porn is done after a breakup. When I was in
university, I sometimes hung out with a group of guys my husband had
befriended. They were all traditionally nerdy: liked video games, Star Wars,
comic books, etc. Of the five or six of them, my husband was the only one
in a relationship. I was always uncomfortable around them. It felt to me like
they didn’t see me as a person. They’d talk around me, never asking my
opinion, some rarely acknowledging my presence at all. I tried telling this
to my husband, but I didn’t want to alienate him from his friends. I couldn’t
really put my finger on what was bothering me, anyway.
But then my husband found out that one of them had a new girlfriend and
had shown the other guys her nudes. I immediately understood my
discomfort. This man had been dating her for a short time and he already
felt he had the right to share her body with his friends without her consent.
Her body was a type of social capital for him, and sharing photos of it with
his friends was a way of sharing—and flaunting—his wealth. These men
were never outright rude to me when I was with them; their ignoring me
wasn’t any different than what I’d expected from most men. But if I’d taken
a nude photo of myself and they saw it, would they see me as even more of
an object and less of a human than they already did? Would their eyes glaze
over as they looked, my image joining the ever-expanding library of naked
women’s images they’d catalogued in their minds? Would they tell
themselves that looking at my photo was the same thing as looking at porn?
At least porn stars know their photos will be looked at by strangers. At least
they choose for their naked bodies to be photographed and for those
photographs to be shared. Theoretically.
I thought about finding out who this man’s girlfriend was and telling her
what he’d done. I knew she had a right to know who she was dealing with,
to protect herself. Instead, I distanced myself from this group of men, never
saying a word to anyone about their revenge-porn bonding session, making
a promise to myself to not take nudes, not even for my husband—not
because there is anything wrong with the photographs themselves but
because you never really knew what a man would do with them, any man,
even the man you trusted most in the world.
There really is no better term for it than “revenge porn”—even when the
man who carries it out is still in a relationship with the woman he’s
exploiting, even when he doesn’t have a reason to be enacting revenge.
Every act of sharing pictures of a woman’s body without her consent is an
act of revenge. As with the (often male) hatred levelled at selfies, the hatred
that leads someone to turn a private photo into revenge porn is a specifically
misogynistic type of hatred. The woman is hated for daring to make a
sexual photo of herself, despite the fact that often the man she’s sending her
picture to asked her to do it. The woman is hated for daring to control the
way a man sees and experiences her body. For having sexual agency, for
seeing herself as sexy, for having a sexuality independent of that man.
This is the same mentality that fuels the rabid demand for nude pics of
celebrities. Every time a woman’s private photos are leaked without her
consent, straight men rejoice at a new trove of pictures to jack off to,
collectively revelling in the violation necessary for these photos to be
available—the violation that makes these photos so scintillating to them in
the first place. They’re sexier than the nude photos celebrities agree to pose
for, or the love scenes they agree to appear in; they’re more “dangerous.”
Why? Because the woman whose naked body you’re looking at did not
want you to see them. The immediacy with which hacked celebrity nude
pics are posted to the internet and downloaded onto millions of hard drives,
regardless of the immorality of it, says more about the connections between
photography, desire, history and immediacy than anything else ever could.
After all, these men simply couldn’t help themselves, could they?
“That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that
everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything
exists to end in a photograph.”
Photos—or the possibility of photos—are everywhere today in a way they
most certainly weren’t when Sontag wrote this line. Still, she seemed to
anticipate the way that photographs would be used to validate people’s
lives, their very existences, in a way that had, until then, been unavailable.
While preparing to write this essay, I typed this into a memo on my cell
phone: “Photo essay: Are our experiences made more real when they’re
witnessed?” I don’t know if, in reading and rereading Sontag or writing and
rewriting this essay, I’ve come any closer to answering this question. The
easy answer is no, of course not. An event is real regardless of whether it’s
witnessed by anyone else. But the other answer, the more complicated
answer, is yes, others witnessing an event makes it more real. People seeing
something happen both validates it and corroborates it. When an event is
witnessed by someone else, you don’t have to rely on your own (faulty,
imperfect) memory to recall it. You can ask others about their memory of it,
or—in the case of photographs—you can revisit an image in order to fill in
the blanks. Ultimately, I think both of these answers are correct in different
ways.
As I come to the end of this essay, though, I’ve realized that the more
important questions about photography and its role in our world have very
little to do with photography at all. The questions I keep coming to are
questions about people, about us. Why do we need our lives to be
witnessed? Why do we need to share our experiences, to have this
connection to others? Why do we need to control others so badly and so
completely that we will even try to control their image? Is it because we’re
trying to make ourselves more real? Is it because that power—as expansive
or minuscule as it may be—fills a void?
Conversely, why don’t we want to be witnessed? Why do we shrink from
others’ eyes? Why do we tell ourselves we don’t deserve to be seen, on
anyone’s terms, even our own?
Maybe the reason everything exists to end in a photograph is because this
world isn’t equipped to offer something more meaningful: for everything to
end in respect, acceptance and acknowledgement.
EXTRACTION MENTALITIES
his is a participatory essay. Think of it as a survey of sorts, or perhaps a
conversation I’m trusting you to finish. The essay is done only when you
consider it finished. I tried to write it without your help but, quite simply, I
don’t have all the answers—even if I sometimes might imply that I do.
The way it will work is this: every so often I will stop this essay to ask
you questions. I’ll leave space for you to answer. Do with that space
whatever you will. Even blank spaces speak volumes.
The most terrifying villains have always been two-dimensional. They have
no complex motivations, no sympathetic backstories detailing their own
personal traumas. Their inner lives are unknown, unknowable. All we know
is they’re hell-bent on destruction.
Perhaps the best example of this type of villain is Michael Myers, the
serial killer in John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween. At the age of six,
Myers murders his older sister, Judith. At the age of twenty-one, he escapes
a mental hospital so he can murder the first pretty, young babysitter he sees,
Laurie Strode, along with every person who stands in his way. For most of
the film we don’t see his face; his eyes are black pits set deep within a
white, featureless mask. He’s cold, cruel, monstrous. Even demonic. When
his child psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, calls Myers “pure evil,” we believe
him. After all, we’ve seen no evidence to the contrary. And it would seem
the filmmakers agree: in the closing credits, Myers’s character isn’t even
given a human name. He’s listed only as “The Shape.”
Abusers often get talked about the same way Myers does: as though they,
too, are pure evil; not humans, but human shapes. Articles on abusers will
detail their manipulation tactics, or their intense, singular selfishness. You
might read click-bait listicles on narcissism and sociopathy—two traits
common among abusers—with ominous warnings typed out at the top of
the page. “Don’t Let Yourself Get Manipulated!” they caution. “10 Red
Flags That Could Save You from Getting Hurt.” As if abuse were so easy to
avoid. As if all you had to do was take one look at a person, then politely
decline, the way one does when a waiter accidentally brings over the wrong
dish. “I’m so sorry, but that’s not what I ordered.” Send it back to the
kitchen. Smile at your tablemates. Move on with your life.
I know this isn’t true. I’ve known abusers my whole life. Yet even I find
myself tempted by the idea of this two-dimensional villain. Abusers aren’t
friends or family members or people you love; they’re shadowy figures
peeking around bushes, stalking their prey, the way Myers stalked Laurie on
her way home from school. They’re not people who can support or nurture
or love; they only traumatize and destroy and ruin, leaving bloodied bodies
and broken psyches in their wake. Good and evil. Right and wrong. These
dichotomies are seductive because they’re so simple. But that’s also why
these sorts of dichotomies will never create the change we need. They’re
too damn simple.
According to a 2014 survey of 2,542 women aged eighteen to thirty-five,
nearly 60 percent had experienced abuse. Knowing this, can you think of
members of your family or any of your friends who have been abused?
Can you think of members of your family or any of your friends that have
been accused of being abusive?
If yes, how did you react when you found out? Are you still close with the
accused abuser today?
If no, how do you reconcile the statistics above with what you think you
know about those close to you?
Have you ever wondered why women in abusive relationships stay with
their abusers?
If your answer to the last question is “yes,” please revisit the third and
fourth questions.
My father enrolled me in a basketball league when I was in grade seven. A
Catholic one, naturally. Being involved with anything Catholic helped ease
my mother’s fears that my siblings and I were being morally corrupted by
modern society.
Drives to basketball practice weren’t long, but they were long enough to
get in some good conversation with my dad. He always seemed more
approachable then. It was as if the act of driving consumed all the energy he
normally required to maintain the masculine, intimidating aura he wore so
well. When he was behind the wheel, he was vulnerable. When he was
behind the wheel, I could be vulnerable, too.
This particular night I was having problems with my best friend and
next-door neighbour, Sam. Desirability politics had shut her out of the
hormone-fuelled coupling most teens think determines their worth. Beauty
standards had declared Sam both fat and unattractive, so she was left to
watch as brainwashed boys settled for me, her thinner, kind-of-cute-but-
definitely-not-sexy friend. I can only imagine how much this got to her. A
boy she had a crush on and started chatting up at a roller rink completely
diverted the conversation by telling her he was interested in me. That was
awkward enough, but then she pressured me to date him despite my never
speaking a word to him. I was confused, but agreed, the way I agreed any
time Sam asked me to do anything. Suffice it to say, our whirlwind romance
didn’t last.
Throughout our friendship, Sam had a habit of implying I was ugly, or
emphasizing how poor I was, or making digs at my weight that left me
feeling worthless. This upset me, but I didn’t want to talk about it with my
mom. She wasn’t a big fan of Sam and seemed poised to pounce on any
excuse for me to cut ties with her. That left my dad and our drive to
basketball practice, his eyes focused on the white lines of the street.
“I just don’t understand why she’s like this,” I said. “I don’t say anything
like that to her.”
“She has an inferiority complex,” my dad replied, his voice so confident I
immediately knew it must be true.
“What’s that?”
“You’re beautiful, talented and smart. She worries she’s not any of those
things, so she tries to make herself feel better by tearing you down. I’ve
known a lot of people like that.”
At the time this seemed the most logical thing I’d ever heard. Of course
she had an inferiority complex. Of course. It made so much sense. The
world had finally slid into focus.
I looked at my father, wondering where he’d learned this. His quiet
demeanour revealed nothing, but it didn’t have to. The knowledge was
enough. I turned and watched the blackened streets fly by my window, a
calm settling my anxious gut. I held on to my father’s words every time
Sam cut me down after that night, which happened with disappointing
regularity until my family moved two years later. I held on to his words
throughout high school and university, through workplace issues and
relationship blunders. I still hold on to his words now. Sometimes you’re
not the problem. Sometimes it’s another person’s insecurity that’s the
problem, and that person decides that rather than fix the problem, they’d
rather take everything out on you.
After reading the anecdote above—a story of my father alternately praising
and counselling me; a story I cherish and will always remember fondly—
did you assume my father was the villain I was writing this essay about?
Why or why not?
Memories are strange. After a certain point you don’t remember the actual
event you experienced anymore. You remember your memory of that event.
Certain details fall away while others loom large. Dialogue distorts. Cause-
and-effect chains tangle and twist.
To further complicate matters, people have a tendency to filter out
memories to reinforce certain ideas. In those cases, what stands out and
what gets buried depends on the story you’re crafting with your memories.
For example, if I wanted to tell you about how much my father supported
my dream to become a writer, all my memories of his abuse and neglect
would fall away. I’d bring up one of the countless times he’s sent me links
to contests or writing opportunities, things he researched specifically for
me. I’d go into detail about the way he used to talk me up to the editor of
our local rez paper, using his friendship with her to try to help me get my
foot in the door. I’d tell you about the time he was sitting in a doctor’s
office reading one of my essays from a literary journal I sent him and the
man next to him asked about it. I’d tell you how, when the man said he was
interested in writing an autobiography but didn’t know where to start, my
father put my essay in his hands, made him read it, then told him I could
help him write his story—for a considerable fee. My father has always
expressed his love by offering unsolicited, unconventional opportunities to
me, the type that can only be dreamed up and brokered by the best, most
innovative salesmen. My father is nothing if not a salesman. His unshakable
faith nourished me, made me believe in myself and my talent when life
gave me so many reasons not to. That’s love.
But loving someone also means letting your guard down around them. It
means revealing the harshest, angriest, most wounded parts of yourself.
Sometimes that’s ugly. Sometimes it leaves bruises. Sometimes it draws
blood. Not just metaphorically. If I wanted to tell you a story about that, I’d
tell you that one of my earliest memories is my father holding me against
the wall by my throat, my feet dangling above the cold cement of our
basement floor. I’d tell you how my older sister screamed at him to let me
go and how my father, surprisingly, listened, dropped me, turned, then
backhanded her, sending her to the ground. The memory ends there. There’s
no resolution, no deus ex machina that swoops in to save us. We were hurt.
We were alone.
The strange thing is my father never abused people he didn’t like. He
never snapped at the racist manager who promoted the less talented white
salesmen around him. He never choked my mother’s brother for stealing his
beloved, expensive stereo system. He saved that for us—for the ones he
said he loved. Did he still love us when he hurt us? Or did he hurt us
because he loved us? Maybe for him love was a fire that could both warm
and burn, encouraging him to become both his best self and his worst self.
Have you ever hurt people you love? If so, please explain why.
When I want to remember the good things about my father, I must forget
the bad things. When I want to remember the bad things about him, I must
forget the good. There’s no space for me to hold both of these realities at the
same time, no grey logic in this black-and-white world. There are either
heroes or villains. Victims or abusers.
These dichotomies must remain intact.
And yet.
Anishinaabe and Métis writer Gwen Benaway writes, “The truth about
survivors is that we come from other survivors, are woven into a history of
violence and rupture as long as we have stories for.” My father is a survivor.
He survived his father. He’s surviving colonialism. He’s also currently
surviving a particularly brutal battle with prostate cancer, for which he has
refused chemotherapy in favour of things like hemp oil and a more
balanced diet. I know he’s in pain because I’ve looked it up. Prostate cancer
causes dull, deep pain in the lower back or pelvis. Sometimes the pain
reaches down into your thighs or up into your ribs. There’s weight loss.
Appetite loss. Nausea. Vomiting. Swelling in your feet. Dad never lets on
that he’s hurting. When I ask him about his health, he mumbles a dismissive
line or two, waving concern away with the flustered annoyance of an over-
mothered child. He knows how to survive. He’s always known how to
survive. Why should I bother him with my fear or doubt now?
I wonder whether he’s treated his own trauma the same way. We’ve never
talked about how his father abused him, for instance. I only know about it
because my mother would make vague comments explaining away Dad’s
outbursts or rationalizing his anger. In these conversations, abuse created a
butterfly effect; a ripple in childhood could create a hurricane in adulthood.
If Dad’s experiences of abuse made him hurt us and our family, how were
our experiences of abuse going to make us hurt our own families? I watched
Dad for hints that he was still hurting from his childhood. Watched him in
the car while he was driving. Watched him while he set up our inflatable
pool in the backyard. I never saw what I expected to see. I only saw him.
Once, while Dad was cutting down a tree for firewood, the chainsaw
stopped working. A small piece of wood was trapped in the chain. Dad
pulled the wood out with his fingers. As soon as he did, the chainsaw
started up again, ripping into his flesh and nearly cutting off the tip of his
index finger. He’d forgotten to turn the chainsaw off. When he came into
the house, damp, dark red fabric wrapped around his hand, my mother
screamed. Dad insisted he was fine, became annoyed when Mom insisted
on driving him to the hospital. He was obviously hurt, but his face was
calm. His face showed no fear, no pain. It was the face he always wore.
It wasn’t until I was older that I considered what this could mean. Maybe
I couldn’t map the pain on his face because he was always in pain.
Last year, a friend asked me about my father. I told her a condensed history
of the way he treated my loving, brilliant mother. I explained how my
father’s physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial and verbal abuse of
her influenced the way I viewed her, the way I viewed myself, and the way
I viewed mental illness. As the words came out of my mouth I could see my
friend trying to mask her disgust. Still my voice was steady, nonchalant
even. I detailed some of my most painful memories as though they hadn’t
affected me at all, even when I was explaining the precise ways they had.
Apparently I had taken on his impartiality to pain, as well.
When I was finished, my friend asked me why I still spoke to him. I
didn’t know what to say. Why did I still speak to my father? It seemed
insufficient to merely say that I loved him, though of course that was true. I
did love him. I do.
But is my love for him, my continued relationship with him, enabling him
to continue the same abusive behaviours that hurt our family? Should I cut
him off for the things he’s done—things he’s shown no remorse for? Would
that teach him to be better?
How long did it take you to come up with an answer to those questions? Or
did you come up with answers at all?
I recently stumbled across a blog post analyzing the ways estranged parents
interact with one another on message boards. Apparently, none of them
have any idea why their children have decided to cut off all contact with
them. Or at least that’s what they initially claim. Slowly, though, the story
trickles out, revealing that they do, in fact, know why their children don’t
want them in their lives anymore.
The problem is that these message boards are run by other estranged
parents. They’re supposed to be “supportive,” but their idea of “support” is
much different from my idea of support. I would have assumed a supportive
message board for estranged parents would be a space where they could
help one another identify and change their own abusive behaviours so they
could eventually repair their relationships with their children.
Instead, the users of this message board spent a lot of time reading one
another’s stories and reinforcing the idea that none of them have ever done
anything wrong. They rarely questioned another estranged parent’s account
of events. They didn’t acknowledge contradictions in the statements they
made to one another, or point out the ways they held their children to
standards they refused to let their children or anyone else hold them to. If
you were to read the comments they made to one another, you’d get the
impression that all of their estranged children and grandchildren were
selfish, ungrateful, illogical, even abusive.
I felt sick reading the posts, wondering if those were the sort of things my
father would say about me if I decided to cut him off. He’d hold up all the
good he’s done for me, hide away the bad, and I would suddenly become
another selfish, ungrateful, illogical, even abusive child in what appeared to
be a sea of such children.
The blog showed that, for these estranged parents, context didn’t matter.
Their children’s feelings and boundaries didn’t matter. The only thing that
mattered was what they felt at any given moment. It was as if these people
all lived in an alternate reality where nothing they did had any
repercussions but everything everyone else did had outsized ones. If you
told them that they made you feel bad, it wasn’t their fault—it was your
fault for misunderstanding what they had meant. And at the same time,
telling them they were making you feel bad made them feel bad, and there
was no excuse for your treating them so terribly. In other words, being held
accountable for abuse by the people they’ve abused was, in fact, abusive.
Have you ever encountered a person who thought being held accountable
was abusive?
Have you ever been the person who thought being held accountable was
abusive?
Is the line between abuser and victim becoming more blurry to you the
more we discuss this? Why or why not?
Gaslighting is an abuse tactic by which a person manipulates another person
into questioning their own sanity. Since I learned the term, I’ve realized the
extent to which my father used this tactic on my family. He eventually took
all of us to an abuse shelter on the rez because he claimed our mother was
abusing him. The shelter believed it and let him in.
Part of me knew this was wrong, but the other part believed my father.
He was so good at making sure we saw what he wanted us to see. The only
time my mother seemed angry at my father’s abuse was when she was
manic. She’d point at him while spitting her testimony, thrust her index
finger into his chest or shove him backwards with a hand. As soon as she
did any of these things, Dad would yell, “Owwwww! Stop it! You’re
hurting me!” and we’d rush in, yelling at Mom to leave him alone.
Sometimes I’d push myself between them, sure that she wouldn’t hurt me
on her way to him. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but he only ever
seemed to feel pain at these exact moments. In this way, my dad used my
mother’s mental illness to make her seem like the abusive parent. He even
convinced me to write a statement about a fight they got into when she was
manic, which he used to get full custody of us while Mom was in the
mental hospital. I was thirteen. I had no idea what that meant. I had no idea
what it meant until it was too late.
I never saw my father hit my mother. I came close once when we were
going to church. Mom was so depressed she was scared to leave the house.
Dad, furious, rushed back in to get her. I didn’t see what happened before
he took off and left us at home, but I did see her head bleeding at the
hairline. I saw her glazed eyes. I heard her whimpering.
I don’t know if my father remembers this. I don’t know if he remembers
any of it. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he only remembers the emotions he
was feeling when my mother wouldn’t leave the house, or the emotions he’s
feeling now that I’m bringing this memory up. Maybe he can’t do anything
but gaslight me.
Does this feel like an explanation, or an excuse? Is there a difference?
In writing about the ways my father gaslit me, and offering only select
memories and one perspective, does it feel like I’m gaslighting you?
Manipulating you?
If we can’t even get abusers to acknowledge the ways they’re abusing
others, how can we ever end abuse?
This is not a question I expect you to answer. It’s just a question I’ve
been asking myself. Particularly since so many discussions around how to
deal with abuse tend to focus on the individual. If you’re a victim of abuse,
you simply need to get away from your abuser and you’ll be fine. You
simply need to cut them off and you’ll be fine. And perhaps you will be.
But as a society, does telling abuse victims to get away from their abusers
really address the causes of abuse? Does it stop the abuser from abusing
others? Does it feel like it’s solving the problem, or ignoring it?
The books I’ve read about abuse usually present domestic violence as an
individual problem instead of a societal problem. The authors will explain
that abusers usually started off as victims, but when they say that, they tend
to mean the abuser was once a victim within an abusive family. That’s
where the analysis ends. They don’t take that logic a few steps further to
situate domestic violence within the larger historical context of state
violence, looking at the ways that the state specifically victimizes and
abuses homeless people, racialized people, LGBTQ2S+ people, women,
children and gender non-conforming people, disabled people, mentally ill
people, poor people, and those who embody all possible configurations of
those identities, in order to further its own agenda. The authors rarely
investigate or interrogate the ways that Western cultural values actually
encourage these abusive behaviours, even if Western laws (technically)
discourage them.
Do you see where I’m going with this? Am I moving too fast?
Okay, let’s back up and unpack that. I’ll use my own experiences, my
family and my nation’s history as an example. As I’ve mentioned, my
family experienced violence and abuse, but that violence and abuse didn’t
start in my family, or even in my parents’ families, or their parents’
families. You need to follow the thread back.
So let’s go back. Way back. On Turtle Island, and specifically within
Haudenosaunee communities, domestic violence was not an issue before
contact. Our clan families lived in the same longhouse together, so you
couldn’t hide the way you were treating your wife and children. Everyone
knew. In addition, after marriage, men would move into their wife’s family
longhouse, so her family members were continually monitoring the
relationship and looking out for the wife and children. If you were found to
be abusive, your belongings would be left outside of the longhouse and you
would have to return to your clan’s longhouse. For the worst offenders of
violence in the community, one of the harshest punishments was expulsion
from the community. That was almost always a last resort.
At the same time in Britain, then eventually in Canada, families lived in
private homes. Every member of the family was considered the personal
property of the man of the house. Things that happened behind closed doors
stayed there. It would be considered rude to ask a man how he treated his
family, since that was his private business. After 1850, domestic violence
slowly began to be outlawed, but arrests still remained rare. Even today
only two-thirds of those who are charged with domestic violence are
convicted—and that doesn’t even take into account the 47 percent of sexual
assaults and 40 percent of incidents where women are beaten, choked or
assaulted with a weapon that are never reported to police. Because Canada
is a carceral state, those who are caught committing domestic violence are
put through the court system. If found guilty, expulsion from the
community in the form of incarceration is often the first resort, not the last,
and can last a maximum of five years. In jail, abusers are not rehabilitated
and taught better ways to deal with their pain, how to be better partners, or
how to deal with the abuse they’ve experienced in their lives. Instead,
they’re treated as subhuman, and told this is what they deserve.
Quite the difference.
My mother has called the cops on my dad for abuse. My father has called
the cops on my mom for abuse. They’ve both been jailed for domestic
violence at different times. It didn’t help them, or our family.
Has being in jail helped anyone you know? If so, how?
Do you think the threat of imprisonment keeps people from being honest
about ways they’ve abused others?
Would you admit to abusing someone if admitting it meant you’d be
imprisoned?
Let’s move out a bit. Let’s think about how nation-states such as Canada are
formed. For a nation-state to exist, for capitalistic wealth to exist, you need
land. The settlers who landed here knew this. When they spoke of this
land’s beauty in their journals and letters, they weren’t respecting the land
as a beautiful, autonomous entity, or admiring the interconnected
relationships between it and the animals, plants, waters and people it
nourished. They certainly weren’t interested in taking up their
responsibilities to this land, ensuring it remained pristine for their
descendants seven generations into the future.
They were concerned with capitalistic ownership. They wanted to suck
up everything they could possibly take, regardless of future consequences,
and turn it into material wealth—ostensibly for their countries, but
realistically for a select few who would benefit much, much more than the
average citizen.
This is what I’ll call extraction mentality. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
writes that “extraction is a cornerstone of capitalism, colonialism, and
settler colonialism. It’s stealing. It’s taking something, whether it’s a
process, an object, a gift, or a person, out of the relationships that give it
meaning, and placing it in a non-relational context for the purposes of
accumulation.”
Under capitalism, colonialism and settler colonialism, everything
Indigenous is subject to extraction. Words from our languages are extracted
and turned into the names of cities, states, provinces or, in the case of
Canada, an entire country. Resources from our traditional territories are
extracted and turned into profit for non-Indigenous companies and strategic
political donations. Our own children are extracted so that non-Indigenous
families can have the families they’ve always wanted, so our families will
fall to ruin and our grief will distract us from resisting colonialism.
Then, after all of this extraction, the nation-state has the audacity to tell
us we should be glad, that the theft was for our own good. Or, more
recently, politicians will admit that awful things were done, but that they
happened in the past and should be forgiven, despite modern-day
equivalents still taking place all around us.
When you Google the word “abuse,” you get “to use (something) to bad
effect or for a bad purpose” or “to treat (a person or animal) with cruelty or
violence, especially regularly or repeatedly.”
Merriam-Webster defines abuse as “the improper usage or treatment of
an entity, often to unfairly or improperly gain benefit.”
Mentalhelp.net defines abuse as “when people mistreat or misuse other
people, showing no concern for their integrity or innate worth as
individuals, and in a manner that degrades their well-being. Abusers
frequently are interested in controlling their victims. They…manipulate
their victims into submission or compliance with their will.”
How do you define abuse?
I can’t see your definition of abuse, but if it’s anything like the other three,
it’s probably safe to argue that nation-states both abuse and gaslight
Indigenous people. But because of how ingrained extraction mentality is,
the nation-state abuses and gaslights its non-Indigenous citizens, too.
Consider this condensed history:
Women were considered men’s property for hundreds of years.
Nearly all of the wealth of so-called first-world countries is a direct
result of trafficking Black people in the transatlantic slave trade. Slave
ownership was widespread in Canada for over two hundred years, and
Black people were not legally considered “people” until 1834.
Japanese Canadians were forcibly interned during World War Two at
their own expense, and their property and finances were seized and sold
well below market value to pay for it. Unlike in the U.S., Canadian
officials did not offer Japanese Canadians food or clothing during their
internment. They had to buy everything themselves. There was no
apology or financial redress from the federal government until 1988.
After thousands of Chinese men built Canada’s railroads, the Chinese
head tax was imposed to keep the families of these men out of Canada.
Labour laws to protect the working class—including rules on minimum
wage, paid and unpaid breaks, and vacation time—exist only because
unions organized and demanded them.
There wasn’t a United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Disabled
Persons until 1975.
Gay marriage wasn’t legalized in Canada until 2005.
Trans people weren’t legally protected from hate crimes in Canada until
2017.
Even when Canada didn’t see these people as people, it still used them,
extracting their labour and turning it into profit, then using their desire to be
accepted by the Canadian state to coerce them into settling Indigenous lands
and erasing Indigenous presence. And all the while Canada has told them
that there’s nothing wrong with the way they’ve been treated, or the way
they’ve been encouraged to treat others; that if they’ve felt dehumanized,
they’re imagining it.
How often have you felt dehumanized this month?
This week?
Today?
Here are another few questions I don’t expect you to answer: If the nation
we live in is abusive, if it gaslights us, and if its profit margins and
legitimacy as a nation depend on abusing and gaslighting us, how can that
nation ever really stop abuse and gaslighting? Why would it want to?
In that way, Canada reminds me of one of those estranged parents that
hangs out on message boards. It hurts people it claims to value, hurts people
it doesn’t, then when those people finally decide they want nothing to do
with it anymore, it asks what it did wrong, hapless, helpless.
Just like those estranged parents, Canada knows very well what it did.
What it continues to do.
My dad still sends me links to writing contests and articles he thinks I’ll
find interesting. He still tries to schmooze with people on my behalf, hoping
to pry open the door to success just enough for me to slide through. He still
jokes with me and lets me make jokes at his expense. His laugh still is the
one sure way to make me laugh.
And he still does things that make me furious, that make me wonder if he
can ever apologize for the past the way I need him to, or make things right
the way I think he needs to make things right. He still does things that
reaffirm my belief that he will almost always put his own interests first. He
still does things that make me question why I continue to talk to him.
But a few years ago he started hugging me. He started saying he loved
me before leaving or hanging up the phone. Neither of these were things
he’d done often when I was growing up. I didn’t realize how much I needed
those hugs, those words, before I had them. And now that I do, I don’t
know if I want to let them go. I don’t know if I can.
I want to hold my father accountable for the pain he’s caused while still
loving him for the joy he’s created. I want to acknowledge him as a victim,
honouring him for what he’s had to survive, without enabling him or
criminalizing him as an abuser. I want the nations and communities we live
in to stop holding individuals to different standards than they hold
themselves to—to dismantle abuse and gaslighting at all levels, micro and
macro.
I want you to feel safe being vulnerable.
I want us both to be safe being vulnerable.
What do you want?
Are those desires based on extraction?
Are they dependent upon capitalism or colonialism?
If the answers to those last two questions are yes, please revisit the first
question.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Success is never achieved in isolation. There are so many people in my life
I’m grateful for who have helped me achieve this dream.
Nya:wen to Kiara Kent for your generous, insightful editing of this book.
You pushed me when I needed pushing, asked the perfect questions when
they needed asking, and always did so with the utmost respect and clarity.
These essays are all better because of you.
Nya:wen to Amy Black, Melanie Tutino, Shaun Oakey and the entire
Doubleday Canada team for your enthusiasm and belief in this book.
Nya:wen to Monique Aura for creating the breathtaking art that graces
the cover of this book.
Nya:wen to my agents, Samantha Haywood and Stephanie Sinclair, for
your unwavering support. You are all I could hope for.
Nya:wen to all of the editors I’ve worked with on the previously
published essays in this collection. Your attention and talent made each
piece worth republishing.
Nya:wen to some of my earliest teachers, Shyam Selvadurai and Michael
Helm, for sharing your wisdom and getting me to read the best writing.
Nya:wen to my Creative Writing cohort at York University for being
generous with their praise and constructive criticism.
Nya:wen to Roxane Gay, who probably doesn’t remember publishing an
early version of “Half-Breed” on The Butter, but whose acceptance came
when I needed it most.
Nya:wen to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose writing has shaped
me and whose support has nourished me. If she hadn’t asked me to submit
to The Malahat Review issue she was editing, then reminded me to submit
again close to the deadline, I would never have written the title essay in this
collection, and she wouldn’t have suggested the perfect title.
Nya:wen to Waubgeshig Rice and Cherie Dimaline, who both believed in
me the moment I met them in Banff. They offered me mentorship and
guidance, suggested places to submit my work and made the confusing
world of grant-writing much more understandable.
Nya:wen to Jack Illingworth and the wonderful people at the OAC. The
grants I’ve received from your incredible organization have helped me
create a writing life for myself.
Nya:wen to both my Banff crews for showing me the power of BIPOC
community. Every one of you has talent that continues to excite, inspire and
astonish me.
Nya:wen to Tanya Talaga for your incredible writing, brilliance,
generosity and care. I’ll never get over you choosing me for the RBC Taylor
Emerging Writer Prize. I hope I can live up to your faith in me.
Nya:wen to every Indigenous writer who came before me and all who
will come after me. You have made and will continue to make Indigenous
lit matter.
Nya:wen to Native Twitter for creating a space where I could find my
voice and feel the warmth of community, especially when I couldn’t be at
Six Nations.
Nya:wen to the people of Six Nations of the Grand River territory for
being strong, brilliant badasses. You’ve all taught me how to resist and how
to reclaim.
Nya:wen to all the friends who have encouraged me and offered me the
gift of their friendship throughout the writing of this book. Special thanks to
Brandi Dunn, Gwen Benaway and Chelsea Rooney, who are some of the
best friends I’ve ever had and who I love dearly.
Nya:wen to my beautiful family. Dad, Mom, Missy, Jon, Mikey, Dakota,
Melita, Teena, Linnie, Gracie, all of my aunties, uncles and cousins. You all
taught me how to laugh loud and love deep. Words can’t express how much
I appreciate each of you. I wouldn’t have made it without you.
Nya:wen to Miles, who has taught me so much already even though
you’re only 12. Being your mother is the best thing I’ve ever done. I love
you.
Nya:wen to Mike, my husband, editor, writing partner and best friend.
You have made me a better person and writer in every way imaginable. I’ll
never be able to repay you for your brilliance, patience, humour, care, love
and friendship, but I’ll spend every day of my life trying.
Finally, nya:wen to you, reader, for offering me the gift of your time and
attention. I hope my little book earned it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALICIA ELLIOTT is a Tuscarora writer living in Brantford, Ontario, with her
husband and child. Her writing has been published by The Malahat Review,
The Toast, Room, Grain, The New Quarterly, CBC Books, The Globe and
Mail, Vice, Maclean’s, Maisonneuve, Today’s Parent and Reader’s Digest.
She is currently creative nonfiction editor at The Fiddlehead. Her essay “A
Mind Spread Out on the Ground” won a 2017 National Magazine Award.
She was the 2017–18 Geoffrey and Margaret Andrew Fellow at UBC, and
was chosen by Tanya Talaga to receive the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer
Prize in 2018. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories
2018, The Journey Prize Stories 30 and Best Canadian Stories 2018.
